stranger

   In rural areas, both in Britain and the USA, this term was formerly the normal way of addressing a person who was a stranger to the district and whose name was unknown. Examples of such usage occur in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, and in The Shadow of the Glen, by J.M.Synge. American usage is displayed in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, depicting life in the early nineteenth century.

   Later, in a thousand western movies. ‘stranger’ was to become closely associated with cowboys, who were thought to accost every city slicker who walked into a saloon with: ‘Howdy, stranger’ Nathanael West, in The Day of the Locust, writes: ‘Tod found his Western accent amusing. The first time he had heard it, he had replied, “Lo, thar, stranger,” and had been surprised to discover that Earle didn’t know he was being kidded.’

   The main use of ‘stranger’ as a vocative in modern times is to one’s friends and acquaintances who haven’t been seen for a while. The word is especially likely to be used to someone one used to see regularly, and who has now reappeared after a lengthy absence. It is used at the moment of meeting, by speakers of either sex to a man or woman.

   In the British Houses of Parliament ‘stranger’ has the sense of one who is not a member of the House or an official. In The Minister, by Maurice Edelman, a policeman calls out ‘Hats off, strangers,’ as the Speaker’s Procession passes by on its way to the Chamber. The policeman. being a stranger in this sense himself, removes his own helmet.