shaver, you young

   ‘Hurry up, you young shavers, you’ll be late,’ says a man in Border Country, by Raymond Williams. ‘Ain’t shaving quite yet, Mr Price,’ replies one of the boys to whom ‘shaver’ was applied. ‘Shaver’ could at one time be applied to a man of any age, but in modern use, which is becoming rare, it is nearly always combined with ‘young’ or ‘little’ and spoken to a boy who is probably too young to be a shaver in the normal sense.

   An early meaning of ‘shave’ was to fleece someone of his money, or even to steal. Professor Weekley, in his Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, draws attention to the parallel use of ‘nipper’ for a young boy, though originally the term applied only to a young pickpocket who nipped, or stole, things.

   ‘Shave’ no longer suggests stealing, and modern use of this vocative would probably evoke a response similar to that of the boy in Border Country. It did not worry anyone in the nineteenth century. ‘You young shaver’ occurs in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, for instance, and in George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life we are told that Mr Gilfil called all male children ‘young shavers’ and all girls ‘two-shoes’.