linguoboy wrote:Meera wrote:In the United States they are called, "red necks", "hilibillys" or "hicks".
Those are all names that more urbanised people would use for small-town people. They aren't generally used by small-town people to insult other small-town people, which seemed to me what Saaropean was asking about. (Though, of course, no matter how countrified you are, there's always someone you can look down on from deeper in the backwoods. For instance, "hicks" [i.e. unsophisticated rural folk] often look down on both "hillbillies" [i.e. poor upcountry folk] and "rednecks" [i.e. poor white farmhands].)
In my part of the country, the all-purpose insult for people from the country was "hoosiers", and it was even extended to those who had been brought up in the city or suburbs but still retained a number of traits pegged as unsophisticated. (In that sense, it is closer to a more class-based term like "white trash".)
It's not used very often, but in Canada I recall people being called
rural in polite language but also there's another less formal and a rude term,
hoser Hoser seems to mean
Canadian; although it's like saying
Canadian redneck to or about individual people, except you can say it to their face if they're an acquaintance
Basically, being a
hoser entails watching a lot of hockey, aside from owning a lot of hockey jerseys and such. It doesn't have to, but this is a common stereotype called
hoser. A farmer, for example could be called a
hoser and then it'd be offensive
You can also use the terms
redneck and
hillbilly, but they don't quite work out in front of the person you're referring to. In this way I think Canadian English is seen as smarter or more polite than its southern neighbor
The only term I remember hearing a few times growing up was
hick. I definitely think even this word to be a regionalism. You don't really hear it in, say places outside the West coast, do you?
Now that I think about it, people in the Eastern region of the States would call rural people
country or maybe
country folk, but if you said that in California it really would sound out-of-place. Like,
maybe you're referencing something from the South, but how come?