fellow

   The original sense of this word was business-partner, but by the fourteenth century it also had the meaning of companion in a more general sense. It became the usual way of addressing a male servant, and at first would have been thought to be no more condescending than ‘my friend’. The habitual association with servants and men of low rank gradually made it impossible to use the word other than insultingly to a man of equal station. ‘None of your fellow,’ says Partridge, in Fielding’s Tom Jones, when a woman addresses him in that way.

   ‘Who’s to prove to me that you are Mr Ramornie?’ says a character in St Ives, by R. L.Stevenson.

   ‘Fellow!’ says the narrator. ‘“O, fellow as much as you please!” said he. “Fellow, with all my heart!

   That changes nothing. I am fellow, of course - obtrusive fellow, impudent fellow, if you like - but who are you?”’ Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers objects to being described as a fellow, even though not addressed as one. These unpleasant associations with the word disappear immediately when it is qualified vocatively, as in: old fellow, my dear fellow, my good fellow, young fellow, poor fellow, etc. In Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens, a man talking to his equal, and normally addressing him as ‘Mr’ + last name, switches to ‘my good fellow’, ‘if you’ll excuse the freedom of that form of address…’. ‘My fine fellow’ is used in a friendly way in Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H.Lawrence, the male speaker addressing another man. Here ‘fellow’ has clearly reverted to its meaning of friend, one with whom one is on hail-fellow-well-met terms. Such usage, especially ‘old fellow’ and ‘my dear fellow’, would still be heard in modern Britain amongst middle-class speakers of a certain age. In the USA ‘fellow’ is usable on its own in neutral settings, with a meaning that has been reduced to something like ‘man’. Its relaxed pronunciation is frequently indicated by the spelling ‘fella’. ‘Wait a minute, will you, fella?’ says a character in Audition, a short story by Dawn Powell. ‘Whaddya mean, fella? occurs in Judith Rossner’s Any Minute I can Split, used to a young man by another, who is called ‘man’ in return. ‘Feller’ is also used as a spelling variant, especially by British writers. It is especially likely to occur in the collocation ‘young-feller-me-lad’, addressed to a young man or boy in a friendly way.

   In modern times, whether used alone or as part of a vocative group, ‘fellow’ no longer carries demeaning or contemptuous undertones. This is especially true when ‘fellows’ is used to a group of men. In Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, the chairman at one point says: ‘Take your seats, fellows!’ varying the usual formula which would have included ‘boys’ as the vocative.

   As an element other than the headword in a vocative group, ‘fellow’ means something like ‘similar to me, the speaker’. It occurs especially when a group of people are being addressed. Thus a preacher in George Silverman’s Explanation, by Charles Dickens, uses ‘my friends and fellow-sinners’ to his audience. ‘Fellow townsmen’ occurs in a political speech in Scenes of Clerical Life, by George Eliot. Political speakers were perhaps especially fond of the word in the nineteenth century, since Dickens chooses to satirize them in Hard Times. He has Slackbridge, representative of the United Aggregate Tribunal, address a group of workers using phrases like ‘oh my friends and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an iron-handed and a grinding despotism’, ‘oh my friends and fellow-sufferers, and fellowworkmen, and fellow-men!’ In a later speech occurs: ‘Oh my friends and fellow-countrymen, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown; oh, my fellow-brothers, and fellow-workmen, and fellowcitizens, and fellow-men…’. All this contrasts greatly with the simple but effective oratory of Stephen Blackpool, who addresses the same group as ‘my friends’ and ‘my brothers’.