Cultural Significance
Before the use of electronic transfers of payments became the norm in the United Kingdom the fortnightly 'giro' payment was the normal way of distributing benefit payments. When unemployment peaked in the 1980s, large numbers of people would receive their benefit payment on the same day leading the concept of Giro Day, marked by the settlement of small debts and a noticeable increase in drinking, partying, and festivity activities. It is the focus of the 1996 film Waiting for Giro.
Read more about this topic: Giro
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or significance:
“The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)