Mind Your Language | 28 June 2003

Mr John Ross, a reader from Derbyshire, was struck by the strange juxtaposition of two phrases of different flavours in the second chapter of Scott’s Kenilworth. On the same page the host says ‘I wot not’ and another character, Mr Goldthread the mercer, says in answer to a question, ‘That I have, old boy.’ Mr Russ associates old boy with public schools, not with the England of Elizabeth I.

Scott is a far from reliable authority on the historic use of language. He was writing fiction, after all, and he sprinkled the page with god wots and forsooths on a suggestive rather than an accurate principle. His magpie antiquarianism sometimes tempted him into error, though never in such a spectacular way as Browning with his celebrated misapprehension of the meaning of twat as ‘a nun’s headdress’.

But Scott was not wrong to think that an Elizabethan might have addressed an equal or slight inferior as old boy. ‘Did she see thee the while, old boy, tell me that?’ Sir Toby Belch asks Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. And there is an ‘old lad’ in Titus Andronicus. Dr Peter Jones would know if they called one another puer senex in the Roman empire, though I don’t think Shakespeare was suggesting they did.

Even more surprising than old boy in the reign of Elizabeth is to find Moses and Aaron being referred to as ‘these boys’ in the 15th century. That comes in the York mystery plays, and the author is not speaking in his own voice. In that period you would have to be careful who you called ‘boy’. It is noted in a contemporary dictionary as the equivalent of the Latin scurrus, which I take it is a variant of scurra, ‘a buffoon or knave’.