man

   A commonly used vocative by mainly working-class speakers, usually addressed to an adult male but in many varieties of English addressed also to women. The latter usage shows that the semantic content of the word can be entirely forgotten, the word being used unthinkingly as a kind of oral punctuation. American speakers use the term more than British speakers of English, which may reflect interference from Spanish, where hombre is commonly used.

   Black Americans and British speakers of Caribbean origins appear to use the word vocatively more than other groups, though it is also very frequent in, e.g., Wales, and English regions such as Tyneside. Welsh pronunciation of man often leads to its being written as ‘mun’. Fares Please, by Edith Courtney, has: ‘Penny tossed her head. “They gave you a black eye.” He touched the great purple and yellow bruise gently, then winced. “It hurts, mun.”’ ‘Mun’ is used like this to women as well as men throughout the novel. A correspondent writes from Newcastle to say: ‘It is very common to address all and sundry (including women and children) as “man”. Sometimes the Christian name is added, with occasional bizarre effect, e.g. one tiny girl yelling to another: “Come on, man Gloria!”’ Bhowani Junction, by John Masters, has an Anglo-Indian speaker saying: ‘Mavis, what are you doing here, man?’ Other women in the book are addressed in a similar way. Used by middleclass speakers, ‘man’ is often used by a socially or professionally superior to a junior, especially if the speaker is irritated with the hearer. ‘Wake your ideas up, man!’ might be an army officer addressing a soldier. Vocative usage can sometimes become very close to being purely exclamatory. In Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck reports a conversation in which a speaker says to him: ‘Man, oh man, you going to see something. Man, oh man, you never heard nothing like it when they get going.’

   As the head-word in a vocative group, ‘man’ reverts to its generic role and is neutral, the overall sense of the vocative expression being conveyed by preceding elements. ‘You coarse man’ is used jokingly by a woman to a man in A World of Difference, by Stanley Price. ‘You terrible man’ and ‘you silly man’ are used in a friendly way by a nurse to a hospital visitor in Resolve This Day, by Geoffrey Bainbridge. Thirteen Days, by Ian Jefferies, has a typical expression used by an NCO to a soldier: ‘you idle, dozy, lazy, dirty man’. This of course would normally be followed by the enquiry: ‘What are you?’ and the reply: ‘An idle, dozy, lazy, dirty man, sergeant.’ ‘You naughty man’ is used by Miss Wardle to Mr Tupman in The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens, and we can be sure that Mr Tupman was delighted to be so called. Expressions like ‘good man’, ‘lucky man’, ‘you poor man’, etc., are common.

   ‘Little man’ is sometimes used flatteringly to a young boy, as in the once popular sentimental song: ‘Little man, you’ve had a busy day.’ It is used to a child in James Joyce’s Dubliners: ‘My little man! My little mannie! Was ‘ou frightened, love? There now, love. There now, Lambabaun! Mamma’s little lamb of the world!’ ‘Little man’, however, can be used insultingly to a man who is either physically little, or is of little importance or significance. See also Man, my and Man, old.