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Mind your language

When did ‘pikey’ become offensive?

12 February 2022

9:00 AM

12 February 2022

9:00 AM

A policeman sent a colleague who was house-sitting for him a WhatsApp message: ‘Keep the pikeys out.’ He was sacked and last month failed in his appeal. A reader wrote to me saying he came across the word pikeys in the 1970s in Oxfordshire and ‘understood it to mean dishonest low-life characters, though not necessarily of a specific group like gypsy or other travellers’.

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