petit bourgeois
1
9.6
- noun
- /pəˈti bʊrˈʒwɑ/
- Slur
:
pequeño burgués
- Many see her focus on material goods as a sign that she is just another petit bourgeois.
Examples
-
The second and perhaps more important power base is among the urban-based small traders and industrialists, who are essentially petit bourgeois entrepreneurs.
Academic text (1990) -
Both are intellectuals; both are liberal petit bourgeois; both were surprised by the outbreak of war in Madrid and separated from their families.
Academic text (2018) -
Spoken like a petit bourgeois.
-
- You're being petit bourgeois again.
-
It's more of a petit bourgeois statement on how Pablo sees her...
-
What really set Chekhov apart from other intellectuals, including most today, were his openly petit-bourgeois values.
Blog text (17) -
Instead, he is a liberal petit bourgeois proudly disinterested in politics.
Academic text (2018) -
Today they are for the most part Belmonte's petits bourgeois: clerks, shopkeepers, teachers, and successful farmers.
Academic text (1990) -
Given that Margaret Thatcher was often derided for being a petit-bourgeois shopkeeper's daughter, it is suggestive that the police here destroy an emblem of her origins, the shop window.
Academic text (2016) -
The lonely Indian among chattering petit bourgeois Frenchmen and fashionable European tourists affords an image of humanity's fundamental loneliness.
Fiction book (1995)
Synonyms
6
9.3
A person who likes expensive things and shows off
Antonyms
How Middle-Class
11
8.4
16
4.2
516
2.0
- Slur
1
9.6
7
3.9
69
2.8
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is compositionally built from French 'petit' (small/little) + 'bourgeois' (middle-class person), so a learner who knows those constituents can infer a meaning like 'lower/small middle-class person'. However it is a borrowed, culturally loaded label with pejorative and evaluative nuances (conventional, materialistic) and register that are not fully predictable from the literal parts, so it is only partly transparent.
Etymology
Petit bourgeois comes from French: petit means 'small' and bourgeois means a town middle-class person. Imagine a small shop owner trying hard to look important, and that picture explains why the phrase now describes someone from the 'lower middle class' who is often seen as conventional or 'materialistic'.