Another of those pedantic questions
Aug. 25th, 2012 05:59 pmOkay, I know when "sirrah" is first recorded - but does anyone know when it fell out of common usage? (I am finding the internet unhelpful.) Consider, f'rexample, Steampunk!Mars: Victoria is on her throne, and colonies are notoriously backward-looking at the same time as being bleeding-edge. Inherently conservative, even as they mint new linguistic coinage. Might a stuffy middle-aged cleric still commonly use "sirrah" to address his inferiors, or had it fallen out of use so long before the 19th century that there's just no way it could have been carried across the aether and survived? Even taking into account that we know the first settlers came over a century earlier?