cousin

   This is described by Robert Chapman, in his Dictionary of American Slang, as ‘an amiable form of address’, the equivalent of ‘friend’ in an expression like ‘How you doin’, cousin?’ Like ‘friend’ itself, ‘cousin’ in this sense need not necessarily be friendly. In Judith Rossner’s Any Minute I Can Split its use by a young man to an unrelated young woman is decidedly aggressive. Chester Hines, in Pinktoes, remarks that ‘black sports from uptown began accosting dignified white ladies on Fifth Avenue with such intimate greetings as “Hello, cuz, how’s your fuzz?”’ Those so accosted perhaps consoled themselves by noting the apparent survival from Shakespearean times of ‘coz’, the familiar abbreviation of ‘cousin’ found in all seventeenth-century literature. ‘Cousin’ at that time had a much wider sense than its present meaning - the son or daughter of one’s uncle or aunt. It was used for any collateral relative more distant than a brother or sister and was frequently addressed to a nephew or niece. Kings and queens also used it to foreign sovereigns, or to the noblemen of their country. Shakespearean characters are thus constantly addressing one another as ‘cousin’, ‘good cousin’, ‘valiant cousin’, ‘my pretty cousin’, ‘my noble cousin’, etc., when they are not using the short form ‘coz’, ‘sweet coz’, ‘good coz’, ‘gentle coz’, and so on. The word inevitably recalled the verb ‘to cozen’, which meant to cheat or defraud someone. Shakespeare could be relied upon to exploit the punning opportunities, and Hotspur plays on the two words in Henry the Fourth Part One (l:iii):

   Why, what a candy deal of courtesy

   This fawning greyhound then did proffer me!

   Look ‘when his infant fortune came to age’ And ‘gentle Harry Percy’ and ‘kind cousin’ - O, the devil take such cozeners!

   ‘Cousin’ was used alone or with the first name of the person concerned, a usage that continued until the nineteenth century. Mrs Gaskell says in Cousin Phillis of Betty, the family servant, that she has adopted the family habit of addressing cousin Paul in that manner, as they do. ‘Cousin’, with or without the first name, was clearly not confined to first cousins. In Bleak House, for instance, Ada is a ward of Mr Jarndyce, but the following conversation occurs: ‘“O, cousin -!’ Ada hastily began. “Good, my pretty pet. I like cousin. Cousin John, perhaps, is better.” “Then, cousin John!” Ada laughingly began again. “Ha ha! Very good indeed!” said Mr Jarndyce, with great enjoyment. “Sounds uncommonly natural.”’ In dialectal usage, by this time, especially in Cornwall, ‘cousin’ was being used as a general term of friendly address, much as in modern American slang. Use of the term by Cornish people to strangers caused ‘Cousin Jan’ and ‘Cousin Jacky’ to become nicknames for them, though these no longer appear to be used. ‘Cousin’ is now very rarely heard as a vocative in Britain, or in any English-speaking country. In middle-class society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was clearly much used, as the literature of the time reveals. It is difficult to say what caused it to go so completely out of fashion.