rotter, you

   In The Ginger Man, by J.P. Donleavy, a wife is made to call her husband ‘you damnable rotter’. ‘Rotter’ is more frequently found in stories about public school life in Britain, from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1930s.

   The term seems to have remained British, but used today it would probably evoke a smile rather than give offence. ‘Bounder’ is rather a similar word, one which would mainly be used as a conscious archaism.

   The thought behind ‘rotter’ is that the person concerned is rotten, in the sense of being morally corrupt, but rotten itself, in that meaning, is now rarely used. The Observer, in one of its ‘Sayings of the Week’ columns (February 1989) reported that the Duchess of York uttered the words ‘Oh you rotter’ to a weighing machine.