Gammon (insult)

Gammon is a pejorative term popularised in British political culture since the 2010s. The term refers to the colour of a white person's flushed face, which purportedly resembles the type of pork of the same name.^[1][2] It is characterised in this context by the Oxford English Dictionary as occurring "in various parasynthetic adjectives referring to particularly reddish or florid complexions".^[3] By 2018, the term had become popularised in British political discourse to describe right-wingers and Brexiters.^[1][4]

Recent history

A half-sliced piece of gammon

A 2004 sports feature in The Observer described Rupert Lowe as the "gammon-cheeked Southampton chairman".^[5]

In 2010, Caitlin Moran wrote that British Prime Minister David Cameron resembled "a slightly camp gammon robot" and "a C3PO made of ham" in her 13 March column in The Times,^[6] later collected in her 2012 anthology Moranthology.^[7]

In 2015, Ruby Tandoh called Great British Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood a "walking gammon joint".^[8]

In 2017, children's author Ben Davis tweeted a picture of nine members of a BBC Question Time audience and referred to them as "the Great Wall of Gammon",^[9] leading to the term becoming popularised, particularly on social media.^{[8][10][11][12][13]}

Earlier historical uses

In 1604, John Marston wrote "Your devilship’s ring has no virtue, the buff-captain, the sallow-westphalian gammon-faced zaza cries" in The Malcontent.^[14]

In 1622, John Taylor wrote "Where many a warlike Horse & many a Nagge mires:Thou kildst the gammon visag'd poore Westphalians" in his verse poem The Great O Toole.^[15]

By the beginning of the 19th century, the word (sometimes extended to the phrase "gammon and spinach") had come to mean "humbug, a ridiculous story, deceitful talk".^[16] Writers of the era who used the word or phrase include Charlotte Brontë,^[17] Charles Dickens (in a number of works, including Nicholas Nickleby,^[18] Bleak House,^[19] The Pickwick Papers,^[20] and Oliver Twist^[21]), and Anthony Trollope.^[22] It has been suggested there is an association between Dickens' usage of the word in Nicholas Nickleby and the modern British usage.^[23] The word in its 19th Century usage remains current in Australian Aboriginal English (without reference to race or skin colour, meaning 'lying' or 'inauthentic').^[24][25]

See also

• Angry white man
• Colonel Blimp
• Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells
• Little Englander
• OK boomer
• Redneck
• Ugly American (pejorative)