bully

   ‘You bully!’ would in modern times be the natural verbal defence of a schoolboy being ill-treated by an older and bigger boy. The school bully is almost an institution, taught his lesson in a thousand and one stories of schoolboy heroism. He is a kind of amateur bully boy, ignorant and cowardly, but rejoicing in his physical strength and taking advantage of other boys’ disinclination to resort to violence, In the eighteenth century the term was applied specifically to a man who protected a prostitute, a pimp. With such unpleasant associations, it is strange to find the word being used amongst the pitmen in the North of England throughout the nineteenth century as a regular term for ‘mate’. Tyneside miners addressed their friends as ‘bully Bob’, ‘bully Jack’, and so on. Such usage would not have surprised Shakespeare, who knew the word ‘bully’ as a term meaning ‘good friend’. ‘What sayest thou, bully Bottom?’ asks Peter Quince, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, which for some reason has far more examples of this word than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, the host of the Garter Inn calls to Falstaff: ‘Bully knight! Bully Sir John! Speak from thy lungs military.’

   The origin of ‘bully’ is obscure but it is clear that the original meaning in English was something like ‘brother’, ‘friend’, or ‘kinsman’. Later developments of the sense may have come about by association with the word ‘bull’, the behaviour of thugs being bullish. The only positive way in which bully is used in modern English is when one congratulates a person on his or her actions by saying ‘Bully for you!’ It was with something like those positive feelings that people used ‘bully’ as a term of address in past times. The more modern schoolboy use is illustrated in Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee: ‘I’ll give thee a clip in the yer’hole.’ ‘Gurt great bully.’ The term becomes a covert endearment when used by a woman to a man in Daughters of Mulberry, by Roger Longrigg.