DCHP-1 Online

pogey [originally, hobo slang for "workhouse"] Slang Though the ultimate origin of this term is obscure, it became current in Canada and was in general use throughout the Depression in a variety of applications, all related to the widespread public-relief programs.

• 1 n. a hostel providing lodging for indigent persons at public expense, supervised by the local relief agency.

  • 1936  I was in the Pogey a couple of nights. It stinks.
  • 1959  . . . lean and hungry alley-cat men swung down from the freights and headed for a fifteen-cent mission meal or the innumerable pogies and scratch houses for a ten-cent cot.

• 2a n. a local relief centre; welfare office.

  • 1936  You ought to see the lousy Pogey (relief centre) they have here [Toronto].
  • 1953  Thousands of self-respecting workmen, bricklayers, stone-masons, carpenters, machinists, and other artisans, sat at home while their wives made the dreary pilgrimage to the "pogie."
  • 1955  . . . the drab files would dwindle in front of the Pogey and swell outside the Recruiting Office.

• 2b n. food, clothing, shelter, etc. provided for the indigent by the public relief agencies.

  • 1955  "I'll never get a Pogey pair [of shoes] unless we raid the goddam joint."
  • 1959  It will be far less of a burden for the taxpayer to provide work and wages clearing up the backlog of unfinished public works than to dole out "pogy" to the unemployed who have exhausted their U.I. benefits.
  • 1964  During the winter we lived on turnips, potatoes, canned clams and the pogy, and Mother and I would hook rugs for the tourist trade.

• 3 n. unemployment-insurance payments.

  • 1960  Today unemployment-insurance payments are often referred to as pogey. But pogey in the depths of the Thirties meant something as different from present-day unemployment insurance as panhandling is from drawing money from your bank account. The word expresses by its very sound, the sometimes harsh and always meagre allowances doled out to the unemployed.
  • 1961  Said a jobless Hamilton steelworker, father of six children: "why should I sweat for $40 a week? I'm getting more than that from the pogey (i.e., unemployment insurance), the welfare and the baby bonus."