Pikey? It’s been around for centuries

An expert on language has waded into the row over actor Orlando Bloom’s use of the word “pikey” on a Radio One show.

Alan Major has compiled two books on old Kentish dialects and says ‘pikey’ and its variant words have meant such things as a vagabond, a person who travels around, an untidily dressed person or anyone with eating manners.

The 88-year-old, of Heaton Road, Wincheap, linked the word to the old turnpike roads in which travellers paid a toll to go through a gate.

He said: “The word was used for a vagabond, a vagrant, living a wandering life with no fixed abode or settled mode of living. Some of these no doubt were also scruffy, badly dressed with poor manners, or ‘low’ persons.

“For generations Romanies and gypsies had lived a nofixed-abode mode of life and it was inevitable the word would be attached to them.”

But he said the term being linked to gipsies was “undeserved”. Bloom, who went to St Edmund’s School, was condemned by traveller groups after he described himself as a “pikey” during a jocular exchange with DJ Nick Grimshaw’s on his show last month. His mother Sonia Copeland Bloom has also defended his comment saying they were in a spirit of affection.

Mr Major added said: “Those annoyed by Orlando Bloom’s use of this word are being too sensitive because if today’s now-mongrel population of Kent were to be asked few would heard of the word or have a clue about its origins and supposed associations,”

“Personally, I don’t think, unless he has a special opinion of himself, that Orlando is a pikey.”

Mr Major’s two books on Kentish language are A New Dictionary of Kent Dialect (1981) and Kentish As She Wus Spoke (2001).

Letters, pages 18-19

Lexicographer Alan Major