Today’s ‘List Friday’. The word ‘charitable’. My dictionary defines it as ‘giving, generous, kind, lenient’. I see myself as a reasonably charitable fellow. More so as I’ve gotten older. I’ve come to see, and appreciate, that by and large people do the best they can, given their background and their resources. And so to bogans. Wikipedia says bogan (which rhymes with ‘slogan’) is Australian and New Zealand slang, of unknown origin, usually pejorative or self-deprecating, for a person who’s perceived to be from a lower class background, or someone whose limited education, speech, clothing, attitude and behaviour exemplifies such a background [1]. An Age article last Monday [2], titled ‘How to spot a bogan’, contains a list of ‘10 things the modern bogan loves’. It seems that non-bogans as well as bogans are fascinated by boganism: Monday’s Age article’s a promo for a new book titled Things bogans like [3] which stems from a blog of the same name [4] which includes a list of (up to now) 184 such things [5]. And several other blogs are devoted to boganism [6, 7, 8]. On one level it’s kind of funny. But taking a charitable view, the bogan subculture’s no more idiosyncratic than other subcultures including, say, the corporate subculture which is generally not considered pejorative. Ho hum.
