GLOSSARY / You're a cad, so that makes me a fossil

AT LEAST one of the services rendered to the nation by High Court judges is the preservation of archaic phrases. Their vocabulary forms a protected enclave1 in which ancient words can survive, like those farms on which antique kine and swine are nurtured for the curious.

Mr Justice Otton demonstrated the principle the other day, in a case widely reported in the tabloids - mostly because they felt able to describe the man facing him in court as a friend of Prince Charles, but also because the judge used the word 'cad'.

I suspect the judge of playing to the reporters' gallery, but it was nice to hear that the word had been uttered aloud all the same. There was a touch of yearning nostalgia about the usage, of a longing for a time when codes of social behaviour were taken as read by gentlemen.

In fact Mr Justice Otton only used the word because the man standing in front of him was of distinctly Wodehousian outline - a polo-playing, double-barrelled merchant banker with aristocratic connections. These days not just anybody can be a cad, you have to be born to it.

In a sense this was always so, but the word has come up in the world since it began. It has had a varied career. Among other things cad has been used to describe an unbooked passenger squeezed on to a coach for the fiddled profit of the coachman; a workman's mate or apprentice and the conductor on a horse- drawn omnibus.

In its more recent sense it seems to have originated at Eton, where it described a townsperson who supplied the boys with small services and goods. Later it served as Oxford slang for a townsman: a cad was definitely one of them. The more upper-crust version involves a peculiarly British piece of moral blackmail - go on like this and I will describe you as a member of the lower-classes. It only really operates within a code which is reinforced by social anxiety2 .

Coincidentally, the word bounder also has connections with the carriage-trade (it used to mean a four-wheeled trap) though the OED offers no real clue, suggesting - rather weakly - that it derives from the deportment of the offending party (all kangaroos are bounders, by this reckoning).

Rogue (which has recently softened into affection) shares a social trajectory with cad, beginning as a quite specific term for vagabonds and vagrants (it features in Elizabethan statutes) and then widening its social connections.

The etymology even offers the possibility of a minor act of retaliation in this class war between superior students and the poor. Rogue may derive from 'roger' (pronounced with a hard g, after the word rogation), a canting term for a beggar who pretended to be a poor scholar from Oxford or Cambridge.

It would be a bit tricky to argue for the return of any of these - hemmed in as they are by social contempt and snobbery, but it's possible to regret the disappearence of words which both name the offender and imply some shared notion of behaviour.

Instead, a largely classless abuse has replaced social reproach. Where you once heard cad, bounder and rogue you are likely to hear the excremental appellation, 'shit'.

A terse monosyllable squeezed between clenched teeth and ending in a dismissive spit, it has obvious poetic merits in vituperation. Indeed the OED's first example comes from Dunbar's The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie (1508), flyting being a now obsolete poetic genre, a sort of verse contest in abuse. Since then it has proved consistently popular. Even Lord Reith, usually a figure of stern3 propriety, was tempted by it, writing about Beaverbrook in his diary, 'to no one is the vulgar designation shit more appropriately applied'.

'Shit' needs no protection from the English courts but I would suggest some judge takes the word 'scoundrel' under consideration, if only because of its tentative etymology. The OED suggests (with nervous arguments to the contrary) that it might derive from the French escondre, to abscond. Perfect for Asil Nadir, I would have thought.

1 French enclaver, to enclose, shut in. The Latin inclavare derives from in plus clavis, key or clavus, nail.

2 From the Latin anxius, which derives from angere, to choke, to distress.

3 A conjectured Indogermanic root ster or star is represented in words representing hard and rigid. Cf. German starr, stiff.