monkey

   ‘God help thee, poor monkey,’ says Lady Macbeth to her son, demonstrating a typical use of ‘monkey’ to a child or young person. Charlotte Brontë has ‘What do you want, you little monkey?’ addressed to a girl aged six in Villette. In Scenes of Clerical Life, by George Elliot, ‘little monkey’ is used by a man to his adopted daughter. There can be few modern children who have not been addressed in similar terms by an adult at some time in their lives. They know that the term is used playfully, referring perhaps to their energy and continuous movement. ‘Go to sleep, you monkeys,’ says a tired adult in Edna Lyall’s How Children Raised Wind. There is an interesting usage by Jonathan Swift, in his Journal to Stella: ‘Well, little monkeys mine, I must go write; and so goodnight.’ Apart from Swift’s little language, however, ‘monkey’ does not generally seem to be used as a term of endearment. It is even decidedly aggressive in Garson Kanin’s Moviola, where a floor manager in a film studio says: ‘Listen, you monkeys, when I say “Quiet” I don’t just mean a little less noise - I mean QUIET!’