gaffer

   In modern times a British worker might say: ‘You’d better see the gaffer about that’, meaning that it is necessary to consult the boss. He might also, in a public house, ask where the gaffer is tonight, referring to the landlord. Such situations could also lead to vocative usage, but when ‘gaffer’ occurs in literary texts it usually has an older meaning. It was originally a term applied in rural areas to an elderly man who held a respectable position in society. The word may have been a corruption of ‘godfather’, though early spellings show that it was thought to derive from ‘grandfather’. It could be used as a prefix before a proper name, as could its feminine form, ‘gammer’. Thus, in Joseph Andrews, by Henry Fielding, we are told that the hero is esteemed to be the only son of Gaffer and Gammer Andrews. This original meaning soon degenerated, and in the seventeenth century it was possible to address a man as ‘gaffer’ as if one were merely calling him ‘my good fellow’.

   A late eighteenth-century writer says that in Buckinghamshire it was the custom for wives to call their husbands ‘gaffer’. This was probably more the case with older married couples, since ‘gaffer’ retains an implication of age in most of its senses.

   Friendly, but still respectful, usage is shown in My Brother Jonathan, by Francis Brett Young. A drayman who is sobering up after being fighting drunk responds to the doctor’s comment to a policeman - ‘I guess he’s had enough to be going on with, constable’ - by saying: ‘By Gum, you’re right, gaffer!’ In the same novel another workman addresses the doctor as ‘gaffer’ in his surgery, and soon afterwards says: ‘Look here, boss, I want my rights.’ This would seem to equate ‘gaffer’ with the modern use of ‘chief’. There is vaguely similar usage in The Magic Army, by Leslie Thomas, where a Devonshire rustic addresses an American army officer as ‘gaffer’.