devil, you

   ‘Devil’ is seldom used vocatively in modern times to refer to a person who is considered to be truly fiendish, inhumanly cruel, or wicked. Such usage is found in Shakespeare, as when Albany says to Goneril in King Lear (4:ii), ‘See thyself, devil! Proper deformity shows not in the fiend/So horrid as in a woman.’ Similarly, in Othello (4:i) the Moor several times calls Desdemona ‘devil’, convinced that she has been unfaithful to him. ‘I have not deserv’d this,’ says that poor lady. But already by the seventeenth century ‘devil’ was being applied to persons in a milder way, to mean little more than ‘you rogue’. ‘You little devil’ would typically be applied in modern times to a child of either sex who had misbehaved quite badly, perhaps to the extent of physically hurting the speaker, but the implication would be that the child concerned was acting devilishly at that moment, not that he or she had a truly diabolical nature. Dickens chooses to make rather a lot of ‘you worldly little devil’, which the narrator in George Silverman’s Explanation says was ‘my mother’s usual name for me’, but the expression does not have the ring of authenticity. Dickens goes on to make much of the ‘worldly’ reference, saying that the child concerned did indeed have a worldly yearning for food and warmth. ‘Dirty old devil’, spoken to one man by another in Life at the Top, by John Braine, is friendly, as is ‘you naughty old devil’ in Dover One, by Joyce Porter. In an expression like ‘you poor devil’, which hovers between exclamatory and vocative use, ‘devil’ is reduced almost to the neutrality of a word like ‘person’, as it is in ‘you lucky devil’, ‘you jammy devil’, etc. Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary rather surprisingly equates the word with the British English use of ‘bugger’ in such circumstances, though ‘bugger’ and ‘devil’ would probably be used by different social strata.