englishman

   ‘You wicked Englishman’ is spoken by an Irishman to an Englishman in The Sleepers of Erin, by Jonathan Gash. The national description adds little in this case, ‘man’ on its own would have carried the same meaning. Dover One, by Joyce Porter, has a foreigner addressing an Englishman as ‘you English’. The implication of this is that English people have a characteristic way of behaving which the person being addressed is exhibiting. Two further examples of ‘you English’ occur in Funeral in Berlin, by Len Deighton, a novel which also contains sixteen examples of ‘English’ addressed to an Englishman by a German. This is a slightly incorrect form of Englishman, which the speaker no doubt intends, since we are told that on one occasion he uses Engländer. A variation of ‘you English’ occurs in Rumer Godden’s The Battle of the Villa Fiorita where a man says to a woman: ‘Oh, you middleclass English!’ He goes on to define middle-class behaviour as ‘stuffy, conventional, prejudiced and ignorant’.