master

   Used as both a social and professional title, though the social use is now rare. It survives in Scotland, where the heir apparent of a Scottish peer is addressed as ‘Master’. Formerly, especially in rural dialects, ‘Master’ was used as a term of respect to a stranger if he appeared to be a gentleman.

   Henry Williamson gives examples of such usage in Devonshire in the early part of the twentieth century in The Dream of Fair Women. ‘Turrible hot weather, measter’ is spoken by a local man to a visitor in a pub, the ‘measter’ spelling indicating dialectal pronunciation. Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge has ‘maister’ being used by yokels to farmers and their sons, the latter sometimes becoming ‘young maister’. Slaves usually addressed their owners as ‘Master’, but once again authors use variant spellings, such as ‘Marster’ in Mark Twairn’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, to indicate sub-standard pronunciation. Resolve This Day, by Geoffrey Bainbridge, has a black African servant girl addressing her white employer as ‘Master’. This kind of usage is sometimes mockingly copied by women addressing their lovers or wives addressing their husbands, especially if the latter begin to act as if they are slave owners rather than equal partners. As it happens, ‘Master’ was at one time regularly used by wives to husbands as a perfectly normal term of address in certain parts of England, such as the north east. This practice continued at least until the beginning of the nineteenth century.

   In Room at the Top, by John Braine, a man uses ‘Master’ to his office boss with sarcasm. There is very similar usage by an American newspaper man in The Late Risers, by Bernard Wolfe. As a professional title, ‘Master’ might be used to the captain of a merchant vessel, as in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest Brothers in Law, by Henry Cecil, has fourteen examples of ‘Master’ being used in a legal context, there being several legal functionaries, such as the Master of the Rolls,

   Master of the King’s Bench, etc., who bear the title. ‘Master’ is also the title of the elected head of certain colleges and institutions. C.P.Snow has fortyfive instances of ‘Master’ being used to the head of a Cambridge college in The Affair, though in his novel The Masters, which is about the contest between two men for the mastership of a college, he uses this vocative only once. Early in the novel we are told that one of the candidates ‘would love to hear himself being called Master’. On the final page of the novel, with the result of the election known, we have:

   ‘Will you dine with us tomorrow-’ Jago paused, and then brought out the word - ‘Master? He had got through it. He scarcely listened to Crawford’s reply. He raised his glass as Gay proposed the health ‘of our new Master’. Jago did not speak again.

   This is an outstandingly dramatic, and successful, literary use of a particular vocative. It is difficult to decide whether it is a social or professional title, but in The Devil on Lammas Night, by Susan Howatch, a modern witch uses ‘Master’ to address a man who is supposed to be the incarnation of the devil. When it was much used as the equivalent of ‘sir’, ‘Master’ had a plural form which was roughly equivalent to ‘gentlemen’, namely ‘my masters’. The latter is usually heard in modern times as part of the quotation from Nicholas Breton: ‘A mad world, my masters.’