Brute

   This becomes a transferred name when a speaker quotes ‘Et tu, Brute?’ supposedly the words uttered by Julius Caesar when he saw that Marcus Junius Brutus, ‘the noblest Roman of them all’, was amongst his assassins. The Latin words simply mean ‘you also, Brutus?’, and the quotation is used to express regret when a close friend appears to be siding with one’s enemies. The speaker is a young husband addressing his wife in My Side of the Matter, a short story by Truman Capote: ‘I said, “et tu Brute?” which is from William Shakespeare.’ The full Latin phrase occurs again in Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, where it is thought rather than said aloud. It is applied by one man to another. The Taste of Too Much, by Clifford Hanley. has: ‘“What is this strange power I have to sicken people with words?” Peter cried. “I’ve hardly opened my mouth all night, and now you, too, Brute.”’ This is strictly speaking a halftranslated mis-quotation; Brute is an oblique form in Latin of Brutus. and it should take that form in English. It is also a regretful question in the original, not a simple statement. There is a different kind of misuse of the Latin phrase in A World of Difference, by Stanley Price. Two men who are house-guests meet each other in the middle of the night, returning to their own rooms after visiting ladies. ‘“The midnight conqueror returns on tiptoe.” He was mock conspiratorial, pulling the collar of his dressing-gown up. “Et tu, Brite?” “Each man conquers what he can.”’ It might have been accurate in this context for one man to call the other Brutus, as a ‘fellowconspirator’, but there is no question of betrayal to justify the whole quotation. ‘Don’t talk to me, don’t, you brute’, says Mrs Raddle to her husband in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers. She is not really accusing him of being brutish, but is displeased with him in general terms. She tells him he is a ‘creetur’ and an ‘aggrawatin’ thing’. In Oliver Twist, however, when Mrs Sowerberry calls her husband ‘you brute’ she means it to be far more of an insult. ‘You ignorant brute’ occurs between men in The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot, and again is meant seriously, referring to cruel behaviour. Such vocative usage appears to have begun fairly late. Shakespeare has Gloucester refer to Edgar as a ‘brutish villain’, but ‘brute’ itself is not used vocatively in the plays. Modern usage is more likely to be light-hearted than serious.

   This is certainly the case when a woman calls a young man ‘you brute’ in Don’t Tell Alfred, by Nancy Mitford. The same speaker also makes use of the term to a woman, which is unusual: ‘“Then the poor little soul will starve,” said Northey. “No matter.” “Fanny, you brute.”’ In Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, by Anthony Powell, ‘you old brute’ is quite clearly friendly in intention. ‘Unhand me, you brute,’ said by a woman to a man in Blue Dreams, by William Hanley, is a joke between intimates.