However, 'chap' here is informal, just a less highbrow/remote replacement for 'person', and (from the context, which hints at say a Bertie-Wooster-like association) having a (dated) British upper-class connection.
chap — " (British) fellow. Origin of chap: chapman" lad — "a male person of any age between early boyhood and maturity" So, it seems, that lad can be related only to a young person. While chap and bloke to any male person. My British fellow said: Chap is more delicate; bloke is rougher a bit. Chap is posh, bloke is common.
No. The standard abbreviations are Ch. and Chap. …or at least, if there is such a symbol, Unicode doesn’t know about it yet — and Unicode is pretty comprehensive, including characters as diverse as the inverted interrobang ⸘, biohazard sign ☣, and snowman ☃, not to mention the Shavian alphabet and much, much, much more.
(Source: Can a woman be a chap?, Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, Grammarphobia, 15 May 2019) Increasingly there is criticism of using potentially gendered terms such as "guys"; you can argue if they are gendered, but there is still the risk of excluding women or upsetting people.
This was supposed to be a funny line but I don't understand what it means I think to chap means for the skin to become rough and cracked as in a cold winter, but what does it mean in this context and why is it supposed to be funny?
By happenstance, I stumbled upon the words cha, char and chai in the dictionary today, all defined as meaning tea in informal British English. I lived and worked in London for some time, but never ...
Calling a lady a bird was commonplace in the late 1900s. Now it's less so, but the British have a habit of reviving these types of words to use playfully, so people will say stuff like "no problem chap", despite chap being very dated generally. These revivals tend to be localised, in both time and space, as well.
@MichaelOwenSartin: To add to the wikipedia article "tally-ho" comes French taïaut or tayaut evolved from Middle French ta-ho formed from two onomatopœic words: ta that was the cry to stimulate the animals and ho a rallying cry. It was used in foxhunting to signal the beast, and also in classical French to expose someone to public condemnation.
If sistren is the female equivalent of brethren, what is the female equivalent of fellow? Words usually paired are: guy/gal; man/woman; boy/girl; lad/lass; brethren/sistren; fraternity/sorority; b...
