cully

   ‘Old cully’ is used by a mortuary attendant when addressing an old man that he is embalming in What’s Bred in the Bone, by Robertson Davies. ‘Old man’ is used by the same speaker to the same man, and is synony-mous, though the latter expression is of course far more common. ‘Old cully’ would be a rare term to use even to a living person. Cully derives from a seventeenth-century slang term used by thieves to denote a dupe, one who was easily taken in. The Oxford English Dictionary cties evidence of its use to mean ‘mate’, rather than ‘simpleton’, in 1676. Partridge, in his Dictionary of Historical Slang, says that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was a Cockney term of address to a man. It was clearly in wider use, however, since the New York Mercury quoted ‘What’s yer hurry, cully?’ as an ‘Americanism’ in 1888. It is now very rare on both sides of the Atlantic.