Yokel

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Yokel is a harsh label for people from the countryside who are seen as unsophisticated. The origin of the word isn’t certain, but it has been used since the early 1800s. It is a form of discrimination against rural people. Yokels are imagined as simple, naïve, and easily fooled, who only talk about farm life—cows, fields, tractors—and aren’t interested in the rest of the world. In the UK, yokels are often pictured wearing a straw hat and white smock, carrying a pitchfork, and listening to Scrumpy and Western music, living in places like the West Country, East Anglia, and the Yorkshire Dales. In the United States, the term describes people who live in rural areas, with many slang synonyms such as bubba, hayseed, rube, redneck, hillbilly, and hick. In Scotland and Ireland, similar labels exist: teuchters in some rural areas and culchie in Ireland, used by urban folk for rural outsiders. The word hick has its own stories, including a link to Old Hickory (Andrew Jackson) or to hickory flour in tough times, and it spread to mean a less-sophisticated rural person. In Australia and New Zealand, a related term is bogan.