Peasant?

[Beverly Flanigan]

Sagehen is right: Ohio has many villages, and it's not just a political
designation but a common usage, at least in southern Ohio.

On peasants:  My international grad students often talk about the
"peasants" back home pejoratively, with the assumption that American
farmers are of the same low status.  I always correct this (as a farmer's
daughter from Minnesota) and point out that farming is an honorable
occupation here.  "Farm workers" or "farm laborers," on the other hand, may
have a less favorable connotation; but we still allow for the possibility
of moving out of that status (or at least I hope we still do...).  And I
agree that no Americans I know of would refer to "Arkansas peasants"; was
the writer originally cited from Europe?

Beverly Flanigan

At 12:36 PM 4/10/2006, you wrote:
> >>
> >Interesting.  The oddity of "peasants in the Connecticut River
> >valley" or "Arkansas peasants" is reminiscent of Bolinger's
> >observation that there's something peculiar about "a village in
> >Kansas" as opposed to "a village in
> >Burgundy/Saxony/Silesia/Lancaster/...".  Not totally impossible, but
> >a bit odd.  (Of course we have "Greenwich Village" or "Stonington
> >Village", or "(go into) the village" (for '(into) town'), but how
> >often do we have "a village" as such in North America?  Maybe we
> >don't have peasants because we don't have villages...
> >
> >Larry
>  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>But we *do* have villages in the US.  Up here in northern NY, and  --for
>all I know -- elsewhere in NY,  "village" is the official designation of
>the smallest  jurisdictional unit, as opposed to "towns" which are what are
>called "townships" in many other parts of the country.  This was also true
>in Ohio.  Some, at least, of the north shore suburbs of Chicago were called
>"villages" when I lived there just after WWII, but that may have been an
>affectation.
>Except for the occasional self-designation as being of "peasant stock,"
>I've never known rural Americans to refer to themselves as "peasants."
>A. Murie
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