sirrah

   An extended form of ‘sir’ which began to be used in the sixteenth century and is still to be found in nineteenth-century literature.

   Joseph Sedley, for example, in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, addresses his servant as ‘fellow’ and ‘sir’, and then says emphatically: ‘Silence, sirrah!’ This perfectly illustrates the use of ‘sirrah’, which is a use of ‘sir’ in inverted address, as it is sometimes called. This simply means that the speaker uses to the hearer the term of address which would normally be used by the hearer to the speaker. Inverted address is not by any means a common phenomenon in English, though in many languages a mother might address her daughter by a term which means ‘mother’, an aunt use a term meaning ‘aunt’ when addressing her niece, and so on.

   The inverted use of ‘sir’, which is still used in modern English, occurs when a speaker who is higher in the social or professional hierarchy than the hearer reprimands or expresses controlled contempt to the latter. ‘Now then, sir,’ says a father to his young son in Seven Little Australians, by Ethel Turner, ‘was it you lamed Mazeppa?’

   This special use of ‘sir’ seems to have led naturally to a special form of the word, just as ‘siree’ developed in American English as a specifically emphatic form. The distinction between ‘sir’ and ‘sirrah’ was a useful one, and it is odd that ‘sirrah’ has diopped out of use. If it lives on in the dialectal ‘sorry’, then its meaning has changed, since ‘sorry’ is normally friendly. That ‘sirrah’ was not so is shown by Ben Jonson, for instance, in Every Man in His Humour.

   ‘Sirrah’ is there equated in close context with ‘you knave’, ‘you slave’, ‘you rogue’, all of which are addressed to the man who is then called ‘sirrah’. In The Alchemist, also by Jonson, Face calls Subtle ‘sirrah’. Dol Common immediately says to Face: ‘Nay, general, I thought you were civil.’ A century later, in Fielding’s Tom Jones, ‘sirrah’ was still being equated with ‘scoundrel’.

   In spite of all this evidence, a possible alternative explanation for ‘sorry’ is that ‘sirrah’ also had a friendly use, though few would agree with V.Salmon who, in an article on Elizabethan Colloquial English in A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama, concludes from his readings of the plays that ‘sirrah’ ‘seems to have answered the need for a respectful form of address to a youth not yet old enough to be called master’ That statement relates to Elizabethan English, it must be remembered, where ‘master’ was the equivalent of present-day ‘mister’. The term which Salmon describes later became ‘master’ itself.

   While ‘sirrah’ may never have been a respectful form of address (in spite of Salmon’s conclusion), it almost certainly had a ‘softer’ meaning than the one used for serious repri mand. This is best evidenced by its occasional use to women and girls.

   Jonathan Swift playfully admonishes Stella in the Journal as ‘sirrah’ and ‘sirrah Stella’. Dekker, Fletcher, and Etheredge are seventeenth-century writers who have similar use of ‘sirrah’ to a woman.

   Swift appears to equate the word with ‘hussy’, also used playfully, but it is more likely that ‘sirrah’ was regularly used to children in mock admonition, so that Stella and other female addressees were receiving a ‘naughty child’ term of address.

   ‘Sirrah’ also occurs in Shakespeare and later writers as a prefixed title followed by a proper name, or by the name of a trade or profession: sirrah Costard, sirrah collier, etc. ‘Sirrah’ in such cases is merely a mock title, imitating the former practice of dignifying a priest, for example, as ‘sir priest’, or simply aping the baronet’s ‘Sir John’.

   ‘Sirrah’ is nearly always spoken by a man, though it may have come to be considered as a word of reprimand which could be used by a speaker of either sex to a social inferior.

   Used to a social equal or superior, the word would normally have been seen as an insult. If the kindlier uses of the word to women and children are simply the normal mock harshness, converting almost any term into a kind of endearment, then the inverted address theory holds good for the original sense development of ‘sirrah’ and its later extensions. In normal modern English usage the word is now obsolete.