boy, old

   Used by British speakers to address a man of any age in a friendly way, whether the man concerned is known to them already or not. The Oxford English Dictionary, under ‘today’, quotes a journalist in 1864 to the effect that ‘“Old boy”, as a form of familiar address…todayish as it may sound…is at least a century old.’ This is certainly true, since examples of ‘old boy’, used by one man to another, can be found in, e.g., Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Nevertheless, ‘old boy’ does not appear to have been a fixed collocation in the seventeenth century, nor is it all that frequent in eighteenth-century literature. In Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding. Tom uses it in a very familiar way to address Square, but a vocative count based on other novels of the period would not place ‘old boy’ highly, ‘sir’ being the norm between men. In modern times ‘old boy’ has been very frequently used indeed in Britain, though it appears to be waning fast in the late 1980s. It is socially marked, suggesting to most British speakers a decidedly middle-class background, perhaps the public schools and their old boys, i.e. former students. Nina Bawden comments on this aspect in George Beneath a Paper Moon: ‘He played rugger and put on weight and changed his accent to camouflage his lower middle-class origins…quite soon it became second nature and he would say “old boy”…without twitching an eyelid.’ The subtleties of the class system in Britain are such that one is likely to offend genuinely upper middle-class and upper-class listeners by addressing them as ‘old boy’. Somerset Maugham has a short story Lord Mountdrago in which the hero says: ‘I wasn’t so much annoyed at his seeing me in that absurd situation as angry that he should address me as “old boy”.’ The man who has committed the offence is a Socialist Member of Parliament. Even more subtle is the comment in A Use of Riches, by J.I.M.Stewart: ‘Hullo, old boy,’ Jim Voysey said. It was a moment before Craine could account for the distaste he felt at this encounter. Voysey had undoubtedly spoken across a semantic chasm, since there existed a highly conventional Craine who froze at ‘old boy’ but would have taken ‘old man’ as venial.’ Daphne du Maurier, in Rebecca, has a Countytype woman using ‘old boy’ to a man in a friendly way, but it is not normally a feminine term in any sense of the word. It appears to be still in use between men, judging by a report in The Times newspaper on 27 January 1984. This concerns a rugby match in which a player of mature years and matching physique won the ball at a lineout, to hear the opposing captain exclaim: ‘Get the fat old bastaid!’ When calm was restored, the victim remonstrated with the captain for his unmannerly words. ‘I’m awfully sorry, old boy,’ was the reply, ‘but I don’t know your Christian name’.

   In fifty novels by British authors, randomly selected but all concerned with life since about 1930, 158 examples of ‘old boy’ occurred. A novel such as Brothers in Law, by Henry Cecil, which has many members of the legal profession featured, has twenty-nine instances of old boy, plus one ‘my dear old boy’. The Limits of Love, by Frederic Raphael, has a few examples of its normal use, but six more instances where it is an intimacy between lovers.