(a.) Of or pertaining to the Roman plebs, or common people.
(a.) Of or pertaining to the common people; vulgar; common; as, plebeian sports; a plebeian throng.
(n.) One of the plebs, or common people of ancient Rome, in distinction from patrician.
(n.) One of the common people, or lower rank of men.
Example Sentences:
(1) The whole phenomenon could be summed up in the familiar phrase, coined by the Romans used to describe their strategy for placating the plebeians – "bread and circuses".
(2) Just as Demirtaş is the current darling of the western ambassadors, so Erdoğan was a decade ago; the ambassadors took it upon themselves to smooth his plebeian edges and refine his worldview.
(3) In his last Russian novel, The Gift , he devoted 50 pages to belittling and mocking the writer and his circle, but admitted that there “was quite definitively a smack of class arrogance about the attitudes of contemporary well-born writers towards the plebeian Chernyshevsky” and, in private, that “Tolstoy and Turgenev called him the ‘bed-bug stinking gentleman’ … and jeered at him in all kinds of ways”.
(4) Again in Port Harcourt, I saw a convoy with sirens blaring driving down the wrong side of the road to avoid waiting like the rest of us normal, plebeian people.
(5) Perhaps he made his exit via the constituency’s Durham Tees Valley airport, barked through security with his shoes and belt in a grey plastic tray, the fate to which his foreign policy adventures have condemned us plebeian travellers.
(6) In other ways, Wonga is just a soft target, put in the stocks for angry plebeians to throw rotten fruit at.
(7) So it has been with the distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of colour, race, and sex."
Proletariat
Definition:
(n.) The indigent class in the State; the body of proletarians.
Example Sentences:
(1) Then his daughter kept things ticking over by retweeting a comment on his critics: "Hello to the bunch of wankers that come from the proletariat and only criticize those they envy".
(2) Source: Adalah General Moshe Dayan on the Bedouin in 1963: "We should transform the Bedouins into an urban proletariat – in industry, services, construction and agriculture.
(3) Rather than, say, advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat in the transitional period, all it takes is to suggest that forcing people out of their homes because they have a spare room is cruel and unjust.
(4) For four decades, the Farc, the army and paramilitaries – claiming respectively to represent the peasantry and proletariat, the state and the landowning classes – fought for terrain and terrorised and drove out those upon it as they advanced or retreated.
(5) Are we finally gearing up for a violent uprising of the proletariat?
(6) They dreamed of bringing proletariat and intellectuals together into one critical mass which would blow their post-Stalinist regimes apart.
(7) If the future of cities means a proletariat turning back into a peasantry, we ought not to expect them to be happy about it.
(8) Marx and Engels’s revolutionary summons to the working classes details the nature of the class struggles between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the problems with capitalism.
(9) "Execute anybody with the temerity to impose fascist regimes such as websense and firewalls on the World Cup watching, work shy members of the proletariat such as myself.
(10) Despite Gorz's longstanding links with trade unions, he increasingly looked beyond the traditional Marxian proletariat to implement his "radically reformist" programme, which advocated a mass exodus from the employment relationship and from commodity-based social relations.
(11) There is, of course, a long history of public campaigns featuring ludicrous and fictitious characters designed to convey messages to the proletariat.
(12) Proximity to British arguments helped shape Marx ’s vision of a proletariat goaded by the inequities and degradations of industrial capitalism into a revolutionary redemption of human existence.
(13) On the now government owned estates, they have formed a kind of industrial proletariat, living in long estate line housing where each family has one or two rooms.
(14) The considerable influence that physicians retain and their level of skill keep them from fitting a strict Marxist definition of the proletariat.
(15) The only people who truly bought into our fantasies of seizing power in the name of the proletariat, were the various arms of the security state such as MI5 and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch.
(16) Globalisation has been the explicit strategy of multinational corporations seeking new proletariats to land on in other countries.
(17) We celebrate them here … Ministry – With Sympathy (1983) Ministry - (1983) With sympathy Long before they honed their monolithic industrial metal sound, Ministry were just another of the 80s new wave proletariat.
(18) In his account, the early New Labour period saw the final confirmation that as far as what used to be called the proletariat was concerned, "middle-class progressives who had traditionally come out fighting these underdogs' corner, or reporting their condition as missionaries or journalists, were keen to silence them, or bury them without an obituary.
(19) Perhaps it's a pity, therefore, that all that survived of his preface to the novel was a single, dogmatic sentence: "As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilisation and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century - man's debasement through the proletariat, woman's demoralisation through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness - are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless."
(20) Just as the established church, rich landowners and Jews were to be swept away by the poor of medieval Europe, so the "world Jewish conspiracy" was to make way for the Third Reich, or the Marxist proletariat succeed the bourgeoisie.