Quinion on "Cad" (With a Footnote on "Bounder")

Michael Quinion, in his splendid weekly newsletter, honors the passing of a popular author, and offers a disquisition on one of my favorite words--"cad" (link):

A man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards a woman. ... "Cad" is the classic British contemptuous epithet of the nineteenth century. It appears, as one example, in Jerome K. Jerome's Passing of the Third Floor Back: "That you and your wife lead a cat and dog existence is a disgrace to both of you. At least you might have the decency to try and hide it from the world - not make a jest of your shame to every passing stranger. You are a cad, sir, a cad!"

Its history is as weird as one might like. The word started life as "cadet", either a military trainee or a member of a younger branch of a family. That developed into "caddie", now solely a golfer's bag carrier, but in the eighteenth century any lad or man who hung about in the hope of getting casual employment as an errand-boy, messenger or odd-job man. Both "cadet" and "caddie" were shortened to "cad". ... The shift seems to have happened at the university of Oxford. Lads from the town who hung about colleges in the hope of casual work of the caddie type were called cads by the undergraduates. It became a contemptuous way to describe townsmen and by about 1840 it had achieved its full flowering as a term for a man whose behaviour
was unacceptable.

This is wonderful, and it prompts me to return to a question that has bugged me before: can one be a “cad” today? Yes, I know that men continue to behave badly. But isn”t caddishness a form of misbehavior that arises only as part of a particular social context?

An answer to me would be: words change their meanings. A man can still be a “cad” even if the term carries a different resonance than it might have carried for Jerome K. Jerome (I wonder when, where and how often (if ever) Carrie Bradshaw refers to anyone as a “cad”). Cf., “snob,” which once meant (if I remember right) an underling in a great house, and only later came to mean one who lords it over others.

I have another assignment for Michael: “bounder,” as in “you, sir, are a cad and a bounder.” Just exactly how is a “bounder” different from a “cad,” so as to require separate naming?

Fn.: Revised 20 Jan, 2008.

Flashman, Kipling and Testosterone Poisoning

Henry at Crooked Timber has an interesting post up remembering George Macdonald Fraser, the author of the Flashman novels (link). Henry's point is that "good old Flashman" was actually a rather nasty piece of business, and that one shoudn't be too casual about indulging a taste for his general thuggishness.

Here's an afterthought: I did read a couple of the Flash books when I was young and found them falling-out-of-bed funny. I read another (Flashman and the Great Game) just a few years back and found it tedious, hard to finish. Great Game is, if I count right, only fourth in the series; the others must have been even earlier. So all of these are part of the earlier, allegedly nastier, Flashman, not the later, more sanitized and allegedly more boring vintage.

I can't say for certain what caused my change of view, but here is a possibility: decline of testosterone poisoning. I never was a particularly laddish lad, but I was moreso then than I am now, and I suspect that I did indeed laugh heartily at some stuff then that would make me feel sheepish today.

I also share Henry's taste for Kipling, but I don't think he needs to apologize for that one: as I think I'[ve said before, on that one he has cover from Orwell on that one (link). But Henry is welcome, if he likes, to explain away this one:

Then we was shifted to Neemuch
(Or I might ha' been keepin' 'er now),
An' I took with a shiny she-devil,
The wife of a nigger at Mhow;
'Taught me the gipsy-folks' bolee;
Kind o' volcano she were,
For she knifed me one night 'cause I wished she was white,
And I learned about women from 'er!

That's from an item called "The Ladies," where Kipling also counsels that

[T]he things you will learn form the Yellow an' Brown,
They'll 'elp you a lot with the White!

Flashman, if he learned anything at all, probably believed that he had learned that.

Update: Fraser has the last word, and the word is "unrepentant" (link). H/T Books Inq.