Vernacular

I had a problem come up at work recently, caused by everybody's favourite bit of English slang - "chav"

The exact definition is hard to pin down, although Wikipedia makes an earnest attempt. Apparently something about being poor, loud and partial to Burberry knock-offs. Any way you define it, the stereotype has taken hold in Britain to the point that it has started to show up in British stock photos. We got a small batch of these images and had to figure out how to keyword them for the North American market.

It didn't make sense to add the word to our keyword list, since it's unlikely that anyone in the US or Canada would ever actually use it as a search word. The next step was to find a word that meant basically the same thing as 'chav' but was more familiar to North Americans. Problem is, there are none. Chav is an entirely British creation - all its signifiers and details mean nothing outside of England. Supposedly
these are chavs. To me, they just look like your average hiphop-obsessed teenagers hanging out after school.

Another idea was to map the word chav to a term describing a North American stereotype, like white trash or trailer trash or something like that. That's when things got icky. Because nobody really wants those words on the keyword list anyway. I mean, it might be okay for campy, Diesel-style images, but what about documentary-style, slice-of-life photos? Will everyone who looks at all poor or uneducated end up labelled white trash?

So I fell back on my standard decision-making technique: checking out what everyone else is doing. None of the major stock sites use White Trash as a search term, which can only be seen as a good thing. As for Trailer Trash, only Getty uses it, and they have it mapped as a synonym for 'hillbillies.' Unfortunately, their results just prove my point about it being dangerous to even allow the possibility of labelling photos with a perjorative search term. One of the trailer trash photos is actually a historical image of a rural family playing music in their house. Even better, one of the people is Augusta I. C. Metcalfe, a fairly well-known American painter. I'm sure everyone at the Metcalfe Museum would be thrilled to see her labelled trailer trash.

So, I've managed to work my way from chavs all the way to pioneer artists in just one post. I guess my point is... keywording is hard. Nobody really gets it, everyone complains about it, and even the simplest problems can lead you down some very strange paths.