YOU may have seen the term “gammon” clogging up your timeline recently. A word that has grown in popularity in recent months.
Some have been savouring its use, seeing it as a clever way of encapsulating a certain breed of individual – namely, right-leaning, middle-aged white males – while others have been getting all salty about it, saying the term is a racial slur.
Beyond hilarious how the majority of the Gammon's angry at the #GammonSongs trend spent the last six months of 2017 calling everyone a 'snowflake' or a 'cuck' thinking they were hilarious.
— DanSmith (@Danjesmith) May 13, 2018
I'm appalled by the term "gammon" now frequently entering the lexicon of so many (mainly on the left) & seemingly be accepted. This is a term based on skin colour & age - stereotyping by colour or age is wrong no matter what race, age or community. It is just wrong
— E Little-Pengelly MP (@little_pengelly) May 13, 2018
Gammon is being used as a pejorative to describe those who have benefited most from the system complaining about that very system. The type of men that reaped in all the benefits as baby boomers but who now shake a raging fist at the modern world and everything that’s wrong with it. Their face reddening into a hue of pink in the process, a slight shimmer caused by beads of sweat – giving them the appearance of a slab of gammon found under the hot lamp at Toby Carvery.
Think of those roasters in the audience of Question Time, one of which invariably ends up receiving airtime and who uses it to complain about “kids today”.
Whatever happens, hopefully politicians will start listening to young ppl after this. This Great Wall of gammon has had its way long enough. pic.twitter.com/N0ZWI3wMuM
— Ben Davis (@bendavis_86) June 8, 2017
Though it may seem a recent phenomenon, some excellent digging has uncovered that the term was actually used as such way back in 1839 by one Charles Dickens.
“Mr Gregsbury’s political conduct, it did not enter enough into detail; and one gentlemen in the rear did not scruple to remark aloud, that, for his purpose, it savoured rather too much of a ‘gammon' tendency,” he wrote.
My god, he's right: @Protooptimism has discovered that Dickens used "gammon tendency" as a political insult in Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9)https://t.co/FFFtX4JaFV pic.twitter.com/rBktJY5orr
— 'Jonn Elledge' is a slur (@JonnElledge) May 14, 2018
More to follow once we've had some dinner.
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