Hypocrite, you

   An accusation of pretending to be what one is not, specifically, of pretending to have higher moral standards than one really has. The hero of Saul Bellow’s The Victim twice uses this vocative to another character, supporting it with ‘you dirty phoney’ and you ‘ugly bastard counterfeit’ to make sure that the message gets across. ‘Hypocrite’ has long been used in English, though it was normally spelt without the initial ‘h-’ until the sixteenth century. Shakespeare uses the word several times, and as a vocative in Henry the Sixth Part One (l:iv), Gloucester telling Henry Beaufort, cardinal of Winchester, ‘Out, scarlet hypocrite!’

   Modern use of the term is well demonstrated in Pray for the Wanderer, by Kate O’Brien: ‘“They’re nice country hotels where the respectable conduct their illicit love-affairs at week-ends - ” “God forgive them!” “You hypocrite.” “Do you mean that I have illicit loveaffairs?” “Hardly. But you’re not shocked.”’ Similarly, Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, has: ‘“Even if you think such things, why do you say them?” she scolded. “If you’d just think what you please but keep your mouth shut, everything would be so much nicer.” “That’s your system, isn’t it, my green-eyed hypocrite?”’ The hypocrite in this case is Scarlett O’Hara, the speaker Rhett Butler. In The Newcomes. by William Thackeray, Arthur Pendennis affectionately refers to his wife as ‘you little arch-hypocrite’ and ‘you false girl’, and is kissed by her for doing so. By contrast, ‘you fucking hypocrite’, spoken by one man to another in Oliver’s Story, by Erich Segal, causes the man so accused to say: ‘I don’t have to take abuse.’ The Face-Maker, by Richard Gordon, has a man say to his brother ‘you bloody hypocrite’ and continue: You and your claptrap about faith and the beautiful life hereafter!’ ‘Hypocrite’ is turned into a nonce name in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. Lady Teazle tells Joseph Surface: ‘Good Mr Hypocrite, by your leave, I’ll speak for myself.’