man, old

   Normally used in a friendly way by middle-class men, especially British men of that type, to other men. In frequent use from 1920–1950, but now less often heard. In fifty representative British novels dealing with life from 1920 onwards, eighty-two examples of old man occurred where the speaker’s intention was clearly friendly. There was also one instance of ‘old man’ used insultingly.

   The expression becomes insulting when ‘old’ switches from its meaning of ‘familiar’ and is used to refer to age. ‘Oh, yeah, you’re gonna whip me, old man?’ says a Los Angeles policeman to an old man, in The Choirboys, by Joseph Wambaugh. ‘What gives you that idea, you old man?’ says one man to another in Moviola, by Garson Kanin. This is during a conversation which began with friendly intentions, but which becomes steadily more aggressive. The speaker who uses ‘you old man’ is soon using ‘you old fart’. Evelyn Waugh, in Vile Bodies, has a woman saying to a waiter: ‘What’s the name of the Prime Minister, you stupid old man?’ Such usage is exceptional rather than the rule.

   In The Watch that Ends the Night, by Hugh MacLennan, a father regularly uses ‘old man’ to address his student son in a friendly way. Between friends the expression is used in, e.g., Room at the Top, by John Braine (nine instances); The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John le Carré (four instances); The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene (thirty instances). Perhaps a more important statistic is that ‘old man’ occurred at least once in twenty of the fifty novels mentioned above. The fullest comment on its use comes in J.B. Priestley’s Bright Day.

   ‘Any particular reason, old man?’ (And this ‘old man’ of his had a peculiar light glancing tone of its own. It didn’t suggest, wasn’t meant to suggest, that he was fond of you, that you were old friends, but hinted at a smooth and easy and metropolitan comradeship, turning you into a man-about-town too).