swain

   The earliest meaning of this word in English was ‘boy’ or ‘servant’. Traces of this survive in compounds like ‘boatswain’, ‘coxswain’. By the seventeenth century the meaning had shifted across to ‘peasant labourer’, or ‘shepherd’.

   Petruchio, in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, calls his servant Grumio ‘you peasant swain’, but he means it insultingly, following it immediately with ‘you whore-son malt-horse drudge!’ ‘Swain’ was clearly not a normal term for a manservant by this time. In The Winter’s Tale, Polixenes in disguise addresses the prince, his son, as ‘swain’, but we are told by Perdita that Florizel has obscured his rank ‘with a swain’s wearing’.

   The word ‘swain’ was romanticized from the seventeenth century onwards by the pastoral poets, and turned into a country lover. A girl might jokingly refer to her ‘swain’ in modern times, but the word has mainly survived in name form, as the last name ‘Swain’ or the Scandinavian first name ‘Sven’.