Most of the time, I am one of the most annoyingly politically correct people I know. I am so PC that even the word “tolerance” strikes me as a tad intolerant. But there is one minority group I can’t stand, and I make no apologies for it: I cannot abide Guilders.

Don’t bother checking your dictionary. Mr. Webster didn’t grow up in my part of upstate New York, so he is under the impression that a Guilder is a form of Dutch currency. His definition is incomplete. Guilder is also a regional word for the blatantly un-PC term “white trash,” a word my parents used frequently as my brothers and I were growing up. Some families teach good behavior by setting standards the children can look up to. Mine instructed instead by pointing down at the ditch we shouldn’t fall into. To my amusement, there is a real town in New York State called Guilderland, Honest. I’ve never been there, but as far as my parents were concerned, it was always just one misstep away.

Picture the Yauger family in the mid-1960s, gathered around the black-and-white TV after supper to watch the Gunsmoke. One of my brothers, a lanky, red-haired teenager sitting on the couch, stretches his legs out in front of him. But before he can get really comfortable, our mother yells, “Get your feet off that coffee table and stop acting like a Guilder!” As another brother is leaving to catch the bus to high school in the morning, Mom catches him by the arm. “Go back upstairs and shave the fuzz off your upper lip,” she tells him, ”You look like a Guilder.” I am still too young for kindergarten, but already I know what a Guilder is and how easy it is to become one by picking your nose in public.

 You could spot a Guilder dwelling half a mile down the road. The paint was peeling off the shutters, and the house had no front step, just a doorway hovering two feet above the ground. Invariably, a baby wearing nothing but a soggy diaper would be playing unattended in the dirt near an abandoned bike with a flat front tire. There was a couch on the back porch and too many cars in the yard, several of which hadn’t run since the Eisenhower administration. Maybe you’d see a pile of old tires leaned up against the house or rusted metal feeding troughs for the livestock or actual livestock that had meandered ill from the fields through a break in the fence. Guilders put up their clotheslines, not at the back of the house, but next to the road where everyone driving by could see how raggedy and dingy their underwear was. Guilders left their junk and their apathy outside in full view.

Their men wore work boots from the barn into town, chewed tobacco and spit on the sidewalk. Guilder women wore bristly rollers in their hair when they went to the grocery store, while their bed-headed toddlers shuffled next to the cart in oversized sneakers with no socks or laces. Their clothes were usually dirty, their noses streamed snot, their front teeth were frequently gray with decay. Guilder school children said things like “ain’t got none” and had to sit next to their brothers and sisters on the school bus because the other kids thought they smelled like pee. The boys, imitating their fathers, wore work boots from the barn to school and sported buzz haircuts that generated rumors of lice infestation. Where Guilders went, mud and cooties were sure to follow.

Most appalling, however, was their deleterious effect on civilization as we knew it. “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” my father would command. “And put some shoes on. Do you want everybody to think you’re a Guilder?” To lapse into Guilderish behavior was to succumb to one’s lowest nature, thereby dragging the whole family down with you by going out with your shirttail untucked. Guilders screamed four-letter words at their kids in public and didn’t care who heard them. They never washed their cars or went to church. We may not always have known the right thing to do, but we were well versed in what to avoid. We could ask ourselves, essentially, “WWGD?” and then we knew: do the opposite.

A large part of my parents’ aversion to Guilders came, I see now, from the thin line that separated us from them. We lived on a farm where the smell of cows was always as close as the nearest open window, or sometimes, the nearest pair of coveralls. Most of the floors in our house were bare plywood covered with ancient throw rugs, except for the kitchen floor, which had to be repainted every spring to hide the mismatched linoleum underneath. In 1969, my parents bought me a new bed and dresser, which was the first furniture in their twenty-year marriage that hadn’t been owned by one of our relatives first. My father held a day job, and then came home to labor on the farm with my brothers every day until dark. The work was hard, dirty, and not terribly profitable, leaving our family with one foot in civilized society and the other covered in cow shit. And you know how slippery that stuff can be.

Living in a different part of the country now, I don’t often use the word Guilder with my own family, but the aversion is steeped in my thinking and our way of life. Our clothesline is tucked away on the side of the house so the neighbors don’t see our underwear–but even if they did, they would never find any holes in it. We park our cars in the driveway, not in the front yard, and most of my husband’s grimiest work clothes end up in the rag bag well before he thinks they’re ready. Not too long ago, I called my family to dinner and my own lanky teenage son sat down at the table bare-chested.

“Go put on a shirt,” I told him.

“Why? There’s nobody here but us,” he argued.

“Because you look like a Guilder,” I said.

“A what?”

“Britney Spears’ husband. Now go.”

A Guilder by any other name…