In modern use this is a polite form of ‘man’; in former times it referred or was used vocatively to a man of noble birth. In Shakespeare’s plays it occurs in the singular form, as when Juliet says to Romeo: ‘Trust me, gentleman, I’ll prove more true/Than those who have more cunning to be strange.’ It is frequently used with a qualifying word: worthy gentleman, honest gentleman, good gentleman. Such usage would be strange in modern times, though Shaw has Liza, the flower girl in Pygmalion, address a customer as ‘kind gentleman’. In The Dream of Fair Women, by Henry Williamson, there is a gypsy fortuneteller who addresses a male client as ‘my gentleman’.
Today’s usage would far more frequently be ‘gentlemen’, addressed to a group of men, used either alone or as part of the formulaic ‘ladies and ‘gentlemen’. Ben Jonson, in Every Man in his Humour, has a servant greet two men with: ‘Gentlemen, God save you.’ ‘We do not stand much upon our gentility,’ replies one of them, though he goes on to prove that he does. In many of its uses, ‘gentlemen’ functions as the vocative plural of ‘sir’. It can be made less polite, or less formal, in ordinary speech by being abbreviated. Thus, in The Late Risers, by Bernard Wolfe, an American male uses ‘gents’ to two male friends. This abbreviated form has been in use since the sixteenth century, though its joking use as a vocative is modern.
It is sometimes used by British publicans as a variant in the ‘Time, gentlemen, please’ formula which signifies that alcohol may no longer be served. In David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, ‘young gentlemen’ occurs, addressed to a group of schoolboys by a headmaster. A special vocative use of ‘gentleman’ occurs in Edna O’Brien’s novel The Country Girls. The word is converted into a nickname and used in direct address with a social title, as ‘Mr Gentleman’. Also special, but less individual, is the ‘gentlemens’ which occurs in The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, by Jesse Hill Ford. This double plural is a feature of uneducated Southern American speech, occurring in ‘womens’, ‘childrens’, ‘folkses’, and the like. The triple plural form ‘menses’ has also been reported in Southern states. There is also the curious ‘you gentleman’, used as a kind of insult by Lady Chatterley to her husband in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H.Lawrence. This occurs during a tirade against the ruling classes, and their lack of sympathy for working people. ‘My father is ten times the human being you are, you gentleman,’ says Lady Chatterley, scornfully.
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