kid

   This word was originally used of the young of a goat, then of other animals. It has been applied to human children since the beginning of the seventeenth century, and is in some respects a synonym of ‘child’. The two words would not be interchangeable vocatively, however. ‘Kid’ could be used to address a young boy, as in The Contenders, by John Wain, where the speaker is an older boy, or a girl. Its main use nevertheless appears to be between adults in a friendly way. It is so used in An American Dream, by Norman Mailer, where the speaker is a man, and again in The Philanderer, by Stanley Kauffmann. An American man uses it to a woman who is only slightly younger than himself in The Late Risers, by Bernard Wolfe. In The Diviners, by the Canadian author Margaret Laurence, occurs: ‘“Look , kid. why don’t you come and stay with us for a while?” Kid. The word they called each other, way back when. Meaning friend.’

   A member of the Names Society, Mr. R.N. G.Rowland, suggests that in Britain ‘kid’ is used especially frequently by Liverpudlians, though such a statement is difficult to prove. Also difficult to prove is Professor Ernest Weekley’s theory that the existence of German Kind, ‘child’ helped to make it possible to use ‘kid’ for a child. The word is certainly used throughout the English-speaking world, as the New Zealand author Anton Vogt shows in his story The Accident. There a motherly woman is talking to a younger man who has just cut off his toes with a bushman’s axe. She says cheerfully:

   ‘How did you do it, kid? Meat shortage isn’t as bad as all that’ In J.D.Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye occurs: How ‘bout sitting down or something, Ackley kid?’ He didn’t like it when you called him ‘Ackley kid.’ He was always telling me I was a goddam kid, because I was sixteen and he was eighteen. It drove him mad when I called him ‘Ackley kid.’

   ‘Kid’ may be annoying to an eighteen-year-old, especially when the speaker is sixteen, but for much older people it is probably complimentary. ‘I thought I’d die,’ says a woman to a friend of her own age (about forty), in Breaking Up, by Norma Klein, ‘if I didn’t get into Radcliffe, and here I am, alive and kicking.’ ‘True,’ says her friend. ‘The wisdom of middle age.’ ‘Slow down, kid,’ says the forty-year old, ‘I’m not ready for middle age yet.’ ‘Who is?’ says her friend. The best-known use of ‘kid’ by any speaker is probably that of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, where as Rick Blaine he utters the words: ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’ The film was released in 1943 but is frequently reshown. In the Newcastle area of England a speaker might well address a brother, perhaps less often a sister, as ‘our kid’.