bloke, old

   This occurs in St Urbain’s Horseman, by Mordecai Richler, when one man says to another: ‘Well, pip, pip, old bloke. And up yours with a pineapple.’ This is in response to being told: ‘I’ve had enough of your puerile jokes, Uncle Lou.’ Both men in this case are Canadian, but the person being addressed as ‘old bloke’ lives permanently in London. In calling him ‘old bloke’, the speaker no doubt thinks that he is imitating British vocative usage, though as it happens, he is not. ‘Bloke’ has certainly been a British slang word for ‘man, chap’ since the mid-nineteenth century, but ‘old bloke’ is not normally one of the ‘old boy/old man’ group of terms used in direct address. ‘Blokes’ on its own does occur as a friendly term of address, used by one man to a group of men, in Doctor at Sea, by Richard Gordon. The same novel has two examples of ‘you blokes’ used in a similar way.