Words of Poverty

Those of us who live and work outside the increasing nanny state safety net that are the western countries do so at our own risk, life can be rough and tough out here in the third world.

In the where ? The where, what did you say ?? Stage-cue: much foaming and frothing at the mouth from those 4x4 driving ladies whot lunch…

Oops, there I go again, thoughtlessly and cruelly, choosing my own words; a crime that will one day bring the sandal-wearing NGO thought police crashing through my mosquito screen door for that 6AM visit; armed to the teeth with vegan sausages and lentil-breath.

The expression third world country usually means an underdeveloped one. What would first world and second world countries be, and how did the designations come about?

These expressions were born in the Cold War era. Because of their numbering, it would be reasonable to assume that they were coined in that order, or at least all at once.

However, third world came first, and the other two phrases, designators, were actually created later.

Third world was coined in French (le tiers monde) by the population expert Alfred Sauvy, to refer to those poorer countries, especially in Latin America, Africa and Asia, which were aligned with neither the communist nor the capitalist blocs.

It originally appeared in an article in L’Observateur on 14 August 1952: “Ce Tiers-Monde, ignoré, exploité, méprisé comme le Tiers-État” (“That Third World, ignored, exploited, scorned, like the Third Estate).

He created it with reference to a famous pamphlet by the Abbé Sieyès in January 1789 about the Third Estate, le Tiers-État, one of the classes in the Estates-General, a pamphlet that was influential in the lead-up to the French Revolution later that year. The Third Estate was the commons or the ordinary people, the First Estate being the clergy and the Second Estate the nobility (the English term Fourth Estate, the press, came from this classification by analogy some decades later).

Third world was taken up in translation by economists and politicians in Britain and the United States in the early 1960s. By analogy, first world and second world were later coined from it in English, being recorded respectively in print in 1967 and 1974.

The former was a collective term for the developed countries that were based on a capitalist model of high-income market economies, of which the UK, Europe and even the USA are principal examples. This was contrasted with the second world, the relatively high-income Communist countries or those with centrally planned economies in which the government owned the means of production; here obviously the USSR was the prime example.

Neither term was as widely used as third world; both have lost popularity since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 except in historical contexts, though the phrase first world countries for the industrialised nations is still in fairly common usage.

As most third-world countries were poor or relatively undeveloped, the term has since shifted in sense somewhat to refer especially to countries with those characteristics, though the formal term for them has progressively became euphemised by the terminally politically correct to developing countries and later on to less economically developed countries.

More recently however, the Über politically correct inform me that they have changed the terminology again, we are supposed to now refer to such countries collectively as ‘The South’ the south? The south of what?? The Southern hemisphere??? Bet that will impress Japan, Australia and New Zealand…

Honestly, it is enough to make a gecko laugh.

Nice to see the millions of dollars of tax funded foreign aid are being well spent on rewording words and are not being squandered on such trivial items as feeding the hungry. Nice to see the root causes of poverty being examined and understood; with action being taken to combat them. Nice to see those that drive 4x4 Toyota Landcruisers are earning their nice fat salaries.