Nephew

   There may be some uncles and aunts who address nephews by this term in modern times, but such vocative usage is mostly obsolete. It occurs regularly in the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however. Upper middle-class British families were fond of recalling family relationships by means of vocative expressions, though it is doubtful that this extended down through society. In Fielding’s Tom Jones the hero is called ‘nephew’ by his aunt. In Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet Major, Benjamin Derriman addresses his nephew Festus, whom he fears and dislikes, as both ‘nephew’ and ‘nephy’. When ‘nephew’ was first used in English it could mean either ‘grandson’, or ‘nephew’ in the modern sense. In seventeenth-century literature it frequently means the former, not surprisingly when one remembers that the word is connected with Latin nepos, the prime meaning of which is ‘grandson’. Shakespeare uses the word, vocatively or otherwise, to mean nephew, grandson, and cousin.