hoss, old

   ‘I tell thee what, Hal,’ says Falstaff to Prince Henry, in Henry the Fourth Part One (2:iv), ‘if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face, call me horse.’ This seems to imply that ‘horse’ as a term of address to a man in the seventeenth century would have been contemptuous, but as the Oxford English Dictionary points out, the word had also been applied playfully to men since the sixteenth century. The same source quotes T.H.Gladstone. author of An Englishman in Kansas (1857): ‘Step up this way, old hoss, and liquor,’ where horse has taken on a typical American pronunciation and is cleaily being used in a friendly way. Confirmation of this comes in Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis (1922): ‘Lyte came to the conference exultantly. He was fond of Babbitt this morning, and called him “old hoss.”’ Later in the novel, as proof of a rapidly developing friendship, we are told of Babbitt himself that ‘he was at Sam Doppelbrau’s at nine. By ten he was calling Mr Doppelbrau “Sam, old hoss.”’ In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, a boy of about Huck’s own age, who has only been acquainted with him for a very short time, says to him: ‘All right - come along, old hoss.’ This novel was first published in 1884.