cockchafer

   Not a term which is habitually used as a vocative, though an interesting example occurs in Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. Jim Dixon is careful to address the head of the history department by his professional title to his face, but Amis tells us what he would like to call him: He’d just say, quite quietly and very slowly and distinctly, to give Welch a good chance of catching his general drift: Look here, you old cockchafer, what makes you think you can run a history department, even at a place like this, eh, you old cockchafer.

   The cockchafer is a fairly large insect or beetle which is very destmctive to vegetation. Since it emerges from the chrysalis in May it is also known as the Maybug. In slang ‘cockchafer’ has naturally been re-interpreted in the past to play upon the penis meaning of ‘cock’, and Amis may have had in mind some such meaning as masturbator, from ‘chafe’ in its sense of ‘rub’. In his Dictionary of Historical Slang, Eric Partridge equates ‘cockchafer’ with ‘cock-teaser’, used of a girl or woman ‘permitting - and assuming - most of the intimacies but not the greatest’.