companion

   The etymological idea behind ‘companion’ is ‘one with whom one shares bread’, a mess-mate. In third person reference it usually has positive associations, but by the end of the sixteenth century, in vocative use, it was being used with familiarity bordering upon contempt. ‘I scorn you, scurvy companion’ occurs in Henry the Fourth Part Two (2:iv). The Oxford English Dictionary also quotes ‘thou jeering companion’ and ‘insolent companion’ from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources. But Shakespeare also has ‘my spruce companions’ used vocatively in The Taming of the Shrew (4:i), ‘you companion’ in Coriolanus (5:ii), and ‘my companion friends’ in Pericles (5:i). When we come to The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens, it is quite clear that the term is being used positively when Mr Winkle calls Pickwick ‘my friend, my benefactor, my honoured companion’. ‘Companion’ is used on its own in a friendly way in Absolute Beginners, by Colin MacInnes, but the speaker is one whose idiolect is marked by the unusual vocatives he uses. The term is normally only used as the head-word in a vocative group, as in the examples given above.