townie
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈtaʊni/
rhymes: -aʊni
Forms: form: townies
form: townee
Etymology: From town + -ie.
Senses: examples: text: Professional gamblers have a cushy racket in college football because old grads and even townies of college localities are sentimental bettors and easy to separate from their money.
ref: 1947 November, “College football business”, in Kiplinger Magazine, page 36:
text: School is an ivory tower on the hill; it nestles in the gated groves of academe. It’s residents do not mix with “townies.”
ref: 1994, Terry O'Banion, A Learning College for the 21st Century, page 11:
text: In Spike Lee's movie School Daze you play a townie who's very hostile to the college students from out of town.
ref: 2004, Terry Gross, All I Did Was Ask, page 336:
glosses: A person living in a university area who is not associated with the university.
examples: text: [Hamlet] was only repeating the phrase of an ordinary English rustic when jeering at a “townie”—whom he suspected of being a gutter-snipe—that “He don’t know a hawk from a hernshaw”.
ref: 1914 June 6, Roper Lethbridge, “Village Words”, in The Saturday Review, page 737:
text: From being a born-and-bred townie from north London, to a 36-year-old part-time farmer and full-time businessman is no mean achievement.
ref: 1998, Ken Ashton, “Preface”, in Graham Irwin, A Farm of Our Own, page 8:
text: The term cockney originally meant cock’s egg or misshapen egg such as a young hen might lay, in other words a lily-livered townie as opposed to a strong countryman.
ref: 2003, Rob Humphreys, The Rough Guide to London, page v:
glosses: A person who has moved from a town or city to a rural area. Especially, one who is perceived not to have adopted rural ways.
glosses: A person familiar with the town (urbanised centre of a city) and with going out on the town; a street-wise person.
glosses: A chav.
glosses: A working-class citizen in a metropolitan area.
examples: text: Bobby Wick stormed through the tents of his Company, rallying, rebuking, mildly, as is consistent with the Regulations, chaffing the faint-hearted [...] comforting the panic-stricken with rude speech, and more than once tending the dying who had no friends — the men without "townies"[.]
ref: 1889, Rudyard Kipling, “Only A Subaltern”, in Under the Deodars, Boston: The Greenock Press, published 1899, page 148:
text: Here I parted with my fellow-townies, whose home shed at Millhouses covers fields where I played as a child.
ref: 1949 March and April, F. G. Roe, “I Saw Three Englands–2”, in Railway Magazine, page 83:
text: The modern Aussie is a townie through and through. Australia is the least densely populated country on earth; it is also among the most highly urbanised.
ref: 1999, Richard D. Lewis, When Cultures Collide: Managing Successfully Across Cultures, page 191:
text: In the 1940′s, a social survey of Victorian country towns found a similar gap between the interests and outlooks of farmers and townies, and an underlying fear on the part of the townsfolk.
ref: 2002, Graeme Davison, “Rural Sustainability in Historical Perspective”, in Chris Cocklin, Jacqui Dibden, editors, Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia, University Of New South Wales Press, page 40:
text: In that sense, the townies, not the farmers, were the inheritors of a pioneer capacity for hard work.
ref: 2005, Marc Brodie, “Chapter 9: The Politics of Rural Nostalgia between the Wars”, in Graeme Davison, Marc Brodie, editors, Struggle Country: The Rural Ideal in Twentieth-Century Australia, page 9.9:
text: Earlier, there would probably have been a grudge match between two townies, or locals.
ref: 2008, Jim Sharman, Blood & Tinsel: A Memoir, Melbourne University Publishing, page 18:
glosses: A person who lives in a city or town, or has an urban outlook.
Synonyms: sense: chav
word: synonyms at chav
Related terms: towner
barnie