granny + last name

   Elderly women are addressed by doctors and nurses in this way in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori. The practice perhaps has a certain convenience in medical circumstances, avoiding the need to distinguish between ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’. It is also possible, if the last name is forgotten, to use ‘Gran’ or ‘Granny’ on its own, where ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’ would sound quite inappropriate. In recent years, however, it has been pointed out that patients’ feelings with regard to how they wish to be addressed should always be respected. In dialectal use elderly women might also be known as ‘Granny’ + surname, but only if they were in fairly humble social positions. In Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet Major, Anne Garland meets an old woman who is proud of her spectacles. ‘What have you seen, Granny Seamore?’ she asks her. Laurie Lee, in Cider with Rosie, devotes a chapter to ‘Grannies in the Wainscot’, describing Granny Trill and Granny Walton, two ‘traditional ancients of a kind we don’t see today, the last of that dignity of grandmothers to whom age was its own embellishment’. They are variously addressed by the villagers as ‘Gran’, ‘Granny’, and ‘Granny’ + last name. ‘You at home, Granny Trill? You in there, Gran?’