what’s-your-name

   ‘Here, you sir, what’s-your-name, walk in, will you?’ This is Mr Perker, attorney to Mr Pickwick, unceremoniously telling a man to come into his room.

   Similarly, in Hard Times, Mr Bounderby says in his typically blunt way: ‘Here, what’s-your-name! Your father has absconded - deserted you - and you mustn’t expect to see him again as long as you live.’ Often the expression is used by a speaker who feels that he is in a superior position to the person being addressed, and implies, in spite of apparently enquiring about that person’s name, that the speaker cannot be bothered to learn it.

   Dover One, by Joyce Porter, has it in the marginally more polite form ‘Mr What’s-your-name’, though the speaker who uses it there does so in a very unfriendly way. Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh, has: ‘Judge What’s-your-name, got any money?’ addressed to an American judge by a British woman.