partner

   This is used both specifically and more generally as a term of address. Specifically it is used while playing certain card games, such as bridge or whist, where two players partner one another to form a team. Such teams are sometimes formed in sports such as tennis and badminton, and once again ‘partner’ could be used by the players concerned.

   An example of the sporting use of partner occurs in My Brother Jonathan, by Francis Brett Young. A young man is playing tennis with a girl he admires. She is more interested in the game than in him, which he finds disconcert ing. ‘She was quite impersonal; he was not Jonathan or Dr Dakers, he was just “partner.” It seemed a pity. Instinctively he diminished his violence in serving to Sheila. “Whatever are you doing, partner?” Edie whispered anxiously.’

   A couple dancing together are also partners. When Henry VIII dances for the first time with Anne Bullen he tells her: ‘Sweet partner, I must not yet forsake you’ (Henry the Eighth, l:iv). In a business context, partners are those who share the ownership of a company. When Uriah Heep has successfully cheated Mr Wickfield, in David Copperfield, he is able to address him as ‘fellow partner’, which he does with his usual oiliness.

   In a more general sense, people who are joined together in a common undertaking of some kind, or are in a similar situation, may loosely consider themselves to be partners. Dogberry, in Much Ado About Nothing (3:iv), tells Verges: ‘Go, good partner, go, get you to Francis Seacoal.’ Dogberry, of course, is a constable, and he and Verges are concerned with lawful business.

   Their modem equivalents would be the teams of American policemen who habitually patrol together. ‘Give em a few licks for me, partner,’ says one policeman to another in The Choirboys, by Joseph Wambaugh, a novel in which many examples of ‘partner’ occur, used between police team-mates. Such teams give a new meaning to the old phrase ‘partners in crime’.

   In Promotion of the Admiral, by Morley Roberts, a man addresses a new companion as ‘partner’. They will be working together in future. In some instances, ‘partner’ is used as a synonym of ‘friend’, ‘mate’, etc., either to someone already known or to a stranger. It is not unusual for its pronunciation to be changed to ‘pardner’ in such circumstances, and incorporated in a phrase such as: ‘Howdy, pardner!’ This is in imitation of the cowboy talk established in many a western film.