primitive person
1
8.9
- noun
- /ˈprɪmɪtɪv ˈpɜrsən/
- Slur
:
[OFENSIVO] persona primitiva
- Anthropologists study the customs and traditions of primitive people from ancient times.
Examples
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Primitive people often had a deep connection to nature and their environment.
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And isn't it interesting that the primitive people figured out the way things were created when they lacked so much scientific knowledge?
Blog text (5) -
There are other factors that primitive people had to deal with outside of their dietary measures.
Blog text (30) -
But as we primitive peoples became more prosperous, we had to count things.
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Religion was made up by primitive people who could not otherwise explain things like disease, crop failures, or lightning.
Blog text (4) -
Culture is a house that we live in; perhaps we have the conceit that we are great people because we live in that house, but in fact we are not better than the 'primitive' people who built the foundation of the house.
Blog text (5) -
How did these primitive people quarry, move, and erect such monsters?
Fiction book (1994) -
Historically, through the research, study, and systematic collection of Native remains and artifacts, museums have objectified Native Americans, believing them to be a vanishing race of primitive people.
Academic text (2004) -
Another example is seen in a 1940 article on the Navajo Indian, in which Gerken explained that in dealing with primitive people, it is necessary to disregard everything but the most basic fundamentals; therefore, needs and relationships are more clearly perceived than in programs dealing with a more complex culture.
Academic text (2011) -
For example, later in his narrative, Thrasher glosses a sexual encounter involving six Inuit men and two female prostitutes with the comment, "These nice-looking women had less morality than the most primitive people you could ever find" (74-75).
Academic text (2013)
Synonyms
7
8.2
A person who lived in a very early, simple society
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and transparently derived from combining primitive (simple, from an early or undeveloped stage) with person (a human individual); the adjective+noun composition yields the intended sense without additional idiomatic shift. This compositional pattern is common across languages, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the MWE meaning (noting that the phrase can be socially loaded in real-world use).
Etymology
Primitive person may come from the word primitive, which once meant 'first', so people used it to picture someone from an earlier, simpler society. That's why it came to mean 'a person from an early or less developed society', but today the term is seen as old-fashioned and insulting, so people avoid using it.