Recession Lexicon: Nouveau Poor

/n. Your class distinction if you used to have two private jets and now just have one. Or had to give up your Pilates class or nanny. You’re feeling poor, but really, you’re not actually poor-poor.

The term has been around for months now, and Barbara Ehrenreich, a chronicler of social change, discussed this demographic in the New York Times on July 14. The recession, she says, has been portrayed as “smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.”

Just as “nouveau riche” was a pretension, “nouveau poor” occupies the same distinction.