saucebox

   Used since the late sixteenth century of a person who is habitually saucy, or impertinent. Such a person was also addressed as ‘sir sauce’, or ‘sauce’. In the USA impertinence is often described as ‘sass’, which derives from ‘sauce’, but although a child might be told to stop being sassy, ‘sass’ is not used vocatively.

   ‘Saucebox’ might still be used in modern Britain as it is in the eighteenth-century novel Joseph Andrews, by Henry Fielding. A young boy says: ‘Yes, papa, I love her better than my sisters; for she is handsomer than any of them.’ ‘Is she so, saucebox?’ one of the sisters replies. She emphasizes the comment by ‘giving him a box on the ear’. The Half Hunter, by John Sherwood, has one man calling another ‘you bright-eyed overgrown saucebox’ in a friendly way. He equates it with ‘chum’.