Leftover (pronounced left-oh-ver)
(1) Usually
as leftovers; food remaining uneaten at the end of a meal, especially when
saved for later use.
(2) Anything
left or remaining from a larger amount; remainder.
(3) A casual (and disparaging) term used in the People's Republic of China to describe women still un-married after the age of twenty-six.
1878: A
compound word left + over; the construct being a noun use of verb phrase left over. The meaning is always in the sense of left
(“remaining, abandoned”) + over (“excess”).
Left is from the Middle English left, luft, leoft, lift & lyft,
from the Old English left & lyft (air, atmosphere) from the Proto-Germanic
luft with which may be compared the compared
the Scots left (left), the North
Frisian lefts, left & leefts (left),
the West Frisian lofts (left), the dialectal
Dutch loof (weak, worthless), and the
Low German lucht (left). Over is from the Middle English over from the
Old English ofer from the Proto-Germanic
uber (over), from the primitive Indo-European
upér, a comparative form of upo; akin to the Dutch over, the German ober & über, the Danish over, the
Norwegian over, the Swedish över, the Icelandic yfir, the Faroese yvir, the
Gothic ufar, the Latin super, the Ancient Greek ὑπέρ (hupér),
the Albanian upri (group of peasants)
and the Sanskrit उपरि (upári).
The hyphenated left-over (remaining, not used up) is from 1890 as a noun
meaning "something left over" is from 1891. The sense of (the almost always plural) leftovers
“excess food after a meal" (especially if re-served later) dates from
1878. In this sense, Old English had metelaf.
Leftover
women
Sheng nu (剩女; shèngnǚ), most
often translated as "leftover women" is a phrase (usually considered derogatory), which describes Chinese women who remain unmarried by their late
twenties. First promulgated by the All-China
Women's Federation (ACWF) as a promotion of government programmes, it’s been used
in other countries but remains most associated with People's Republic of China (PRC). As a demographic phenomenon, it was once unexpected
because the conjunction of the PRC's one-child policy and the disproportionate
abortion of female foetuses had led to a distortion in the historic gender
balance. Births in China since the one-child
policy was introduced in 1979 have averaged 120 males for every 100 females
compared to a global ratio of 103:107.
A bride with four suspected leftovers.
The term appears to have entered common-use in
2005-2006 and seems first to have appeared in the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan. Unlike most of Cosmopolitan’s editorial
content, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took it seriously and instructed the
ACWF (a kind of cross between the CWA (Country Women’s Association) and the PLA
(People’s Liberation Army) to publish articles stigmatizing women still unwed by
their late twenties. Borrowing from
Maoist tradition (if not theory), the ACWF provided a useful analysis of the
problem, concluding that while “pretty girls” didn’t need much education to
find a rich partner, “average or ugly” ones who seek higher degrees thinking it
will “increase their competitiveness” in the marriage market are delusional;
all that happens is they become old “…like yellowed pearls." The rhetorical flourishes aside, they had a
point. As the numbers of highly educated
women rose, the numbers of potential husbands they found acceptable did
not. What the distorted gender balance
created by the one-child policy and the selective-sex abortion preferences had
produced was an increasingly educated and middle-class female minority not
impressed by a less schooled and more rural male majority.
Geographic distribution of leftover women, People’s Republic of China.
“Leftover women” seemed the choice in print but on
the internet, the punchier 3S or 3SW (Single,
Seventies (referring to the then
prominent 1970s birth cohort) and Stuck)
was also used instead of sheng nu. There is an equivalent term for men, guang gun (bare branches (ie men who do
not marry and thus do not add branches to the family tree)); shengnan (leftover men) does exist but is
rare.
CCP demographers had expressed concerns about the social and economic implications of the one-child policy as early as the 1990s. In the new century, the policy was first selectively relaxed, then revised to permit additional children for those selected by the CCP as desirable breeders and, on 31 May 2021, at a meeting of the of the CCP Politburo, the three-child policy (三孩政策) was announced. The session, chaired by Xi Jinping (b 1953; CCP general secretary 2012- & PRC president 2013-), followed the release of the findings of the seventh national population census which showed the number of births in mainland China in 2020, at twelve million, would be the lowest since 1960, an indication of the demographic trend causing the ageing of the population. The Xinhua state news agency then announced the three child policy would be accompanied by supportive measures to “maintain China's advantage in human resources” but surveys suggested the section of the population the CCP would like to see produce three children per household were generally unwilling to have even two, the reason overwhelmingly the high cost of living in Chinese cities. The announcement on 26 July 2021 permitting Chinese couples to have any number of children was thus greeted by most with restrained enthusiasm.
Leftover no longer: Lindsay Lohan's engagement ring. Ms Lohan announced her engagement in 2021, marring the following year. In 2023, a post confirmed reports of her pregnancy.
The problem of re-production is not restricted to the PRC, the birth rate in South Korea now down to around .8 per woman while a rate around 2.1 is necessary if the population is to be sustained. What exacerbates the problem in the PRC is the simple lack of women of child-bearing age, caused by the distorted male/female live-birth rates in the decades following the imposition of the one-child policy and any vague hope the long stretches of lock-downs may have encouraged procreation were not realized. Despite that disappointment, the CCP wasn't discouraged and embarked on a new propaganda campaign making it clear to young women that having babies was part of their patriotic duty to the motherland: pregnancy was now compulsory. In the West, the decline in the birth rate has for some time been thought a problem, largely because of the impending acceleration in the distortion between those of working age (paying into the system) and those not generating income (extracting from the system). Of late however, influenced by the un-anticipated rapidity in the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, theorists are re-visiting the models and pondering the implications.
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