you + nominal group

   The commonest use of ‘you’ in vocative expressions is as an introductory word, followed by a nominal group. Such vocatives tend to be insulting, or reproachful, or mockingly so. At their simplest they are two-word expressions such as ‘you fool’, ‘you bitch’, ‘you pig’. They frequently include an adjective: ‘you bloody liar’, ‘you dirty beast’, ‘you little upstart’. They can on occasion become as extensive as the vocative in Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis: ‘you bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation’. ‘You’ is sometimes brought into play again to round off such expressions. The Oxford English Dictionary states that this is ‘often’ the case. That may have been true in earlier times.

   Shakespeare has vocatives of the ‘you puppet, you’ type, that one occurring in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In David Garrick’s Bon Ton, first produced in 1774, we have ‘you wicked wretch, you’; ‘you beast, you’; ‘you rascal, you’.

   Sometimes this final ‘you’ appears to be used for emphasis, as in the modern ‘you bastard, you’, but Kipling’s ‘ye long, limp, lousy, lazy beggar, you’, in On Greenhow Hill is clearly not to be taken too seriously by the person to whom it is addressed. As for Becky Sharp’s remark to Joseph Sedley, in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, her ‘Don’t be leading our husbands into mischief, Mr Sedley, you wicked, wicked man, you,’ leaves that gentleman feeling decidedly pleased and flattered.

   It may be that this final ‘you’ is in modern times becoming a signal to the hearer that a covert endearment is being used, or an expression, at least, that is certainly not to be interpreted at its face value. On the frequency issue, in a vocative count of fifty fairly modern British novels which contained at least a hundred vocative expressions introduced by ‘you’, only two were rounded off by a final ‘you’.

   In The River of Diamonds, by Geoffrey Jenkins, ‘you bastard, you’ is friendly when said by one man to another. The same novel has fifteen other examples of vocatives introduced by ‘you’ where the word is not used at the end.

   Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, by Alan Sillitoe, has an insulting use of ‘you bastard, you’. The novel has another twenty-seven ‘you’ + nominal group vocatives. On this evidence it is no longer true to say that ‘you’ often completes a vocative expression that has been introduced by that word. It can, incidentally, occur at the end of a vocative group without being used at the beginning.

   The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, by Jesse Hill Ford, has ‘low-down Federal bastard, you’ used as an insult. What appears to be dialectal usage is found in Like Any Other Man, by Patrick Boyle, where Irish speakers use ‘Good, you boy, you’ and ‘Good, you girl, you’. There is a rather similar usage by a Welsh speaker in Other Men’s Wives, by Alexander Fullerton: You think that’s possible do you, you Bland you? ‘Bland’ is here the last name of the hearer. These instances would be decidedly unusual in standard English.