you…you…you

   There is an old joke which has one man enraged with another, but so angry that he cannot think of what to call him. All he manages to get out is ‘you…’, which he then repeats as he searches for the right insult. The other man replies: ‘Don’t you call me a “you-you”.’

   Novelists quite often indicate this state of near speechlessness by having a speaker begin the vocative sequence with ‘you’, repeat it once or twice, then give up as the words fail to come to mind.

   The vocative expression is left dangling for ever.

   An example of ‘you…you…you…’ occurs in Like Any Other Man, by Patrick Boyle. A man is trying to tell a woman what he thinks of her but cannot think of anything adequate. He clearly wants something stronger than the ‘stupid, horn-mad, careless bitch’ which he has used a moment or two previously. Sometimes the speaker gets as far as the adjective which follows ‘you…’ and then trails off.

   North Dallas Forty, by Peter Gent, has: ‘“You lousy…” My voice and energy tailed off as I was unable to conceptualize a proper insult’ Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, has Scarlett O’Hara saying to Ashley Wilkes: ‘“You lowdown - lowdown - ” What was the word she wanted? She could not think of any word bad enough.’