bean, old

   The Clasgow Herald, in 1920, equated the terms ‘old bean’ and ‘old thing’ and associated them with the English spoken by Piccadilly toffs. Sinclair Lewis seems to do something rather similar in Babbitt, published in 1922. He puts ‘old bean’ into the mouth of a visiting Englishman, Sir Gerald Doak. The first occurrence of the expression is in Kipps, by H.G.wells, published in 1905, but there it is merely a passing reference to ‘this old Bean’, Bean being the name of a solicitor. The naming of the character and the use of this phrase may have been a deliberate joke on Wells’s part, of course, the expression being already current

   The reason for ‘bean’ is difficult to guess at. Its slang meaning of ‘head’ may have helped, a meaning which might still be heard in the sense of beaning someone, i.e. hitting him on the head. Certainly many vocative expressions make use of ‘head’. John Galsworthy tells us that ‘old bean’ was used by women as well as men. In To Let (1921) he writes about modern young girls, bare-necked, visible up to the knees…with their feet, too, screwed around the legs of their chairs while they ate, and their ‘So longs’ and their ‘Old Beans’, and their laughter - girls who gave him the shudders whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them.

   ‘Old Bean’ is still occasionally heard in Britain, always humorously and usually in an accent which is supposed to imitate a high-society speaker. There is an example of such usage in Georgy Girl, by Margaret Forster, where a girl who bumps into a woman shopping in Knightsbridge, a high-society area, says ‘Sorry, old bean’ in a very hearty voice.