Terminology Watch: “The Gold-Collar Worker”

Mr. Baleiro: “Happiness has no logo.”

A Tupi translator colleague and friend inquires over the instant messenger — what a dangerous excuse for procrastination that is — about the term “gold-collar.”

I reply, “Check the Urban Dictionary, ué!”

The Word Spy is another good sociolinguistic Zeitgeist observatory, although it is written by closed group of authors, I think, rather than wikiwise.

It is interesting to compare the two, in fact, when trying to track down evolving contemporary usage. The two methods complement one another.

The UD’s contributed definition:

Young working-class adults who feel that they are entitled to luxury goods such as couture, state-of-the-art electronics, overpriced cars and pretty much anything that they cannot afford.

Acception:

“The gold collar contingent, ages 18-25, is doing its part by downing $12 Kettle One vodka martinis and sporting the sleekest rims on their Lincoln Navigators. To sustain a lifestyle inspired by rap videos and pop-culture magazines such as Us, they spend a disproportionate amount of their disposable income on expensive brand-name products and services.” –See the Seattle Times article, “Gold-collar generation: The world is theirs?”

It reminds me a bit of the Indian-English term “zippies.”

See also “dirty-white-collar.”

Here in Brazil, you had a spasm of mediatic consciousness about a parallel sociological phenomenon a few years ago: the powerful appetite displayed by young employees of the, er, undergound economy for brand-name goods.

Kids killing kids in order to steal their Nike Air Jordans, that sort of thing.

The fondness of the rougher segments of São Paulo’s manos — latter-day incarnations of Ivan in The Harder They Come — for motorbikes became so proverbial, for example — “girls just won’t go for guys who don’t have a motobike,” says one young interviewee in MV Bill’s documentary Falcão: Children of the Traffic — that it gave rise to a profile: Young men on shiny new motorcycles are criminals.

Hence, you started seeing a rise in “accidental” shooting deaths of motoboys and middle-class kids cruising the strip. There was such a case at a local mall here recently, for example.

An off-duty military policeman, of course. Using his service weapon outside of working hours? Never clarified. Victim? Class B Catholic high-school boy.

Trigger? Knocked over an orange traffic cone with a trailing foot, like a zagueiro converting the easy try, while zipping by the security guard in the parking structure.

In another case, a favela-dweller in Rio rode a motorbike was trying to hail a cab to transport a parent to the emergency room. The parent had had a stroke.

The young man was killed by PM patrolman with one to the armpit and one to the head. The young man, one reads, was unarmed.

Hence the line from the lyric by the popular musical artist Zeca Baleiro, in “Vô Imbolá”:

Alegria não tem grife

“Happiness bears no [corporate] logo.”