fruit

   British and American speakers use ‘fruit’ in rather different ways as a vocative. ‘Old fruit’ is the usual British expression, equivalent to ‘old boy’, ‘old man’, etc. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English thinks that it is becoming rare, but literary examples are easily found. There are several examples of friendly use between males in Henry’s War, by Jeremy Brooks, another in Thirteen Days, by Ian Jefferies. The Business of Loving, by Godfrey Smith, has an example of a first name followed by ‘old fruit’. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the expression from the early 1920s and says that it was also heard as ‘old tin of fruit’. The latter phrase is pure nonsense: ‘fruit’ on its own might have been explained as derived from ‘fruit of the womb’, where ‘fruit’ could be said to mean a child. American usage tends to be ‘you fruit’, or more fully, ‘you fruitcake’. Here the origin appears to have been the humorous expression ‘nutty (= mad) as a fruitcake’, so that a fruitcake was at first a crazy person, a nut, or an odd-ball. By the 1930s, according to A New Dictionary of American Slang, both ‘fruit’ and ‘fruitcake’ had taken on the meaning of male homosexual. The words are often used with one meaning or the other in the mind of the speaker, but at times they seem to represent merely a vague insult. Oliver’s Story, by Erich Segal, has: ‘“If you’re anxious to resolve this issue sooner, there’s another process.” ‘Yeah, you fruit?”’