rat

   In modern times this is nearly always a term of contempt, though ‘you rat’, like most insults, can be turned into a covert endearment in the right circumstances. When a woman calls her lover ‘Rat!’ in The Philanderer, by Stanley Kauffmann, it is intimacy that is revealed rather than a contemptuous relationship.

   Surprisingly, ‘old rat’ could once be used as a friendly term between men, if the instance in Stevenson’s Black Arrow reflects general usage in the nineteenth century. There is some evidence that it does, since Hood refers to a ‘poor rat’, a man, in a sympathetic way.

   Earlier still, in the seventeenth century, human rats were either clergymen or pirates. thanks to punning allusions to curates (kewrats) and pie-rats. As Shylock says, in The Merchant of Venice, ‘there be land-rats and waterrats - I mean pirates.’

   Shakespeare also used the word in its more general opprobrious meaning, as for instance when Hamlet, hearing a voice behind the arras, says ‘How now! a rat?’ and stabs Polonius.

   In Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, John Reed, a fourteen-year-old boy strikes the ten-year-old heroine and says ‘That is for your impudence…you rat’. The narrator goes on to say that she is accustomed to John’s abuse.

   Clearly ‘you rat’ could be used in the nineteenth century as it is in modern times. ‘You little rat’ is an insult, for instance, in Absolute Beginners, by Colin MacInnes. In Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, we have ‘you crazy little rat’, which is then expanded to ‘you bloody crazy little rat’. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers, occurs ‘you pasty-faced, shrunk-gutted, rickets-ridden little rats’, addressed by a man to two others.

   It is just possible that ‘Ratty’ could be used affectionately in modern times, since the British middleclasses, if one is to judge by the Valentine Day announcements in national newspapers, seem to be fond of giving lovedones names taken from nursery tales.

   Ratty, in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, is one of Toad’s friends. There is also a character called Ratty by his friends in Samuel Lover’s novel, Handy Andy. In that case it is an affectionate diminutive of Horatio, his real name. In The Sophomore, by Barry Spacks, there is an illusion to the Hamlet quotation mentioned above. A man tells another, passing on a message from a girl: ‘She says to tell you your name is Polonius. What does that mean?’ ‘It means I’m a rat,’ says the man concerned.