(n.) A countryman; a rustic; especially, one of the lowest class of tillers of the soil in European countries.
(a.) Rustic, rural.
Example Sentences:
(1) Massive protests in the 1990s by Indian, Latin American and south-east Asian peasant farmers, indigenous groups and their supporters put the companies on the back foot, and they were reluctantly forced to shelve the technology after the UN called for a de-facto moratorium in 2000.
(2) Westminster wits had taken to ridiculing the rebel movement against Gordon Brown as a "peasants' revolt", a cohort without influence.
(3) Agroecology guarantees land to peasants, species diversity, decent work and food sovereignty, among other principles.
(4) As secretary general of La Via Campesina , the transnational peasant movement, he is the public voice of nearly 200 million small-scale producers, landless people, and farm and food workers in more than 180 organisations across nearly 90 countries.
(5) Cinematically, RED SORGHUM achieved a fantastically rich colour palette in its politically less-than-correct depiction of Chinese peasant life – blood and earth predominate – and trod a careful political line by focusing on atrocities by the invading Japanese rather than internal repression.
(6) Tellingly, loyal peasants relate how Guzmán chartered aircraft to take their children to the state capital for medical treatment, like a good old-school mafia don.
(7) It is expected that among the pupils of vocational mining schools who usually come from numerous peasant and working class families nutritional mistakes may occur very often.
(8) Nordestinos brought their hearty, meaty peasant cuisine with them, and one former factory worker, Jose Oliveira de Almeid, called simply Seu Ze, opened a small restaurant called Mocotó in the working-class suburb of Villa Medeiros.
(9) I might have said a few things after other forms of medication that I shouldn’t have done, but then again we all have, haven’t we?” Smith stood down as candidate for South Basildon and East Thurrock – regarded as one of Ukip’s most winnable target constituencies – this month after the release of a recording of a phone call in which he mocked gay party members as “poofters”, joked about shooting people from Chigwell in a “peasant hunt” and referred to someone as a “Chinky bird”.
(10) The field trial indicated that the grass carp could not only cut down the mosquito larvae population but also benefit the peasants by increasing the production of both fish and rice.
(11) Two ethnic groups in Laos were compared: the Hmong (or Meo), a tribal group with access to opium in their homes; and the Lao, a peasant people with more limited access, usually in opium dens.
(12) This case is observed in a 24 years old woman patient, of peasant extraction, who presents tumoration of the left hemiface, irregularly oval, 18 x 25 cm.
(13) In rural areas, plantation owners have a grip on local politics in the northeast that is little short of feudal, while the soy and cattle barons of the interior push landless peasants and Indian communities further to the margins.
(14) La Via Campesina has been lobbying in Geneva for a UN declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas.
(15) The newspaper said he joked about “shooting peasants”, referred to a woman with a Chinese name as a “chinky”, made claims he later retracted about the party leader, Nigel Farage, and called Steven Woolfe, Ukip’s immigration spokesman, a “fucking carpetbagger” and an “arsehole”.
(16) Historically, our masters have always imagined we lowly peasants will digest information more easily if it is written, for example, in a speech bubble coming out of the mouth of an imaginary squirrel pedestrian in yellow loon pants.
(17) Studies about life-time sport of different groups of population in Switzerland showed that 82% of 1990 apprentices in the town of Zürich and 59% of young peasants were active in sports in their leisure time.
(18) The article reports the results of the investigation on atmospheric pollution and mercury poisoning caused by the peasants mercury smelting.
(19) And, like all peasant messiahs, Mao promised a society in which all men would be equal.
(20) But soon after being appointed archbishop in 1977, he became a staunch critic of the military government after it began killing, kidnapping and arresting priests who had been organising peasants and supporting workers’ rights.
Serf
Definition:
(v. t.) A servant or slave employed in husbandry, and in some countries attached to the soil and transferred with it, as formerly in Russia.
Example Sentences:
(1) This is bad news for aggregators whose digital serfs cut, paste, compile and mangle abstracts of news stories that real media outlets produce at great expense.
(2) His moment of fame is over and he vanishes into the shadowlands of Britain's serf-labour force.
(3) The Pavlovs, a highly achievement-oriented family descending from a lowly serf, improved their social status by serving the Russian Orthodox Church.
(4) They desired, rather, that it be lived on a higher level than that of a serf, treated as an inconvenience by a moribund oligarchy.
(5) It is the centenary of President Lincoln's inauguration, and of the beginning of the Civil War which ended with the liberation of the American slaves; it is also the centenary of the decree that emancipated the Russian serfs.
(6) At their best, blogs such as Nightjack, or the Civil Serf who revealed life in a Whitehall office before also being exposed, made the public services more open, and improved debate about how they should run.
(7) It is "simply disgusting at a time when people are struggling to heat their homes, these energy barons are treating them like serfs, and the government and the regulator are letting them get away with it," he said.
(8) So, he put his best serfs on it and came up with a birth certificate naming his father, Fred.
(9) The oldest is a 64-year-old who fled civil war only to find herself virtually imprisoned in the UK as an unpaid domestic serf.
(10) This threat is used to justify the absence of a constitution, the destruction of the judicial system, and the implementation of indefinite national service that allows the government to treat each civilian as a modern-day serf for their whole life.
(11) As always, the rich and powerful want to know all they can about us – "the serfs and slaves" as Assange called us – while letting us know as little as possible about them.
(12) The situation in the UK (as in Italy) continues to be insupportable, yet somewhat like "serfs", we've seemed resigned to suffering it, as if no serious alternative existed.
(13) In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law which introduced some protections for these imported serfs, under what has become known as the guest-worker program.
(14) Almost all low-paid work is essential: a living wage would stop cheapskate employers scrounging off tax credits and importing what too often looks like serf-labour.
(15) Thirty per cent are labourers, labour tenants, and squatters on white farms and work and live under conditions similar to those of the serfs of the middle ages.
(16) A case could be made that the unhappy family of the opening is the Russian aristocracy in the 1870s, trying to hold the line against excessive change after the grant of freedom to millions of human beings it had owned as slaves, the peasant serfs, in 1861.
(17) But all the baggage of that word (unelected, concentrated power keeping serfs in chains) has no meaning at all applied to Christine Blower, the elected representative of working people whose decisions she can argue for or against but must always reflect.
(18) "Knowledge has always flowed upwards, to bishops and kings not down to serfs and slaves.
(19) That was Charles – impatient, controlling but also thoughtful towards his serfs.
(20) Back then Wimbledon felt like – in fact prided itself on being – a leftover from some ancien regime, with the players toiling and serfing on the lawns of a feudal estate.