Knave
The term is exclusive to British English, with a strange semantic history, having been originally a common neutral word meaning simply “boy,” before deteriorating to mean a rogue or a rascal, finally becoming virtually obsolete. The development is not entirely unique, since churl, wretch , and villain have followed this pattern, defined by C.S. Lewis as “the moralization of status words ” (1960, 7).
Knave originates in Anglo-Saxon cnafa , meaning “a boy,” and maintained this neutral sense for centuries: thus a male child was termed a knave child up to the fifteenth century. The lower status of the term becomes apparent from the subsequent senses of “servant,” “peasant,” or “page.” The use of knavish to mean “dishonest” is first found in Chaucer, ca. 1390, while knavery is recorded much later, ca. 1528. The term was clearly an insult by 1480, when the records of the English Guilds list it as actionable: “If any Brother despise another, calling him knave, horson” (Early English Text Society 1870, 315). By Shakespeare’s time semantic deterioration had become completely established, since the basic meaning is “a villain,” with the implication of “lower-class” still apparent. In King Lear (1604–1605), Oswald, a supercilious steward who has given cheek to the King, receives a vituperative reprimand from the Duke of Kent: “A knave, a rascal … a base, proud, shallow, beggarly … knave, a lily-livered [cowardly] action-taking [legalistic] knave … the son and heir of a mongrel bitch” (II ii 15-24).
Thereafter knave started to lose moral force, becoming more of a loose insult, before steadily declining in currency. It is now a generally passé upper-class British usage, also found in cards to refer to the jack. It has made no impact on the other global varieties of English.
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