A couple of hundred years ago “pal” was a cant term, part of the specialized jargon of English beggars, rogues, and criminals, and it meant something like “accomplice,” “partner.”  The word was imported to the underworld by Romany (i.e., “Gypsy’) vagabonds, in whose Sanskrit-derived language phal or phral meant “mate,” “brother.”  Romany is the source of several underworld terms in English, for example “shiv,” the thin blade a criminal carries, and “nark” for “informant.”  Later on, “pal,” unlike “shiv” and “nark,” grew respectable, becoming the standard-usage term for “close friend” which we all use.

What interests me is the way “pal” came back into the American underworld.  In Raymond Chandler’s novella Red Wind, from 1938, the detective-narrator Philip Marlowe has witnessed a gangland killing, and then he opens his door to find the killer standing there with a gun:

     “Well, I’m alone,” I said, and my voice shook just enough.
     “It don’t make any difference,” he said.  “I’m washed up anyway.  Some nose puts the bulls on me tomorrow, next week, what the hell?  I just didn’t like your map, pal.  And that smug-faced pansy in the barcoat that played left tackle for Fordham or something, to hell with guys like you guys . . . Tell me why I came here, pal.”
     “You heard the kid and me talking in the bar.  I told him my name, where I lived.”
     “That’s how, pal.”

“Pal” used this way, in aggressive direct address, can be found everywhere in hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1930s.  In the fifty odd pages of Red Wind the word occurs fifteen times, spoken by thugs and tough cops alike, and always aggressively:

     “You was curious about her yourself,” Copernik sneered on.  “But you were smart, pal.  You fooled me.”
     “That wouldn’t make me smart,” I said.

For women, incidentally, there would seem to be a parallel term, “sister,” a word implying closeness but in practice used dismissively or aggressively.

In the relentlessly combative world which Chandler and other hard-boiled writers created, insulting names—“copper,” “shamus,” “dick,” “peeper,” “punk,” “cheapie,” “bo,” “sister”—are as common as bullets fired from .45 automatics, but “pal” would seem to have a special impact.  It’s a sadistic greeting, going along with the gunman’s ironic smile as he pulls the trigger.  Also, as a cant word like “nose” (stool pigeon), “map” (face), or “bulls” (police), “pal” identifies tough guys to each other, saying, in effect, “you and I talk the talk, we know the score.”  In this sense, paradoxically, “pal” might be said to retain a little of its original, unaggressive meaning.  Marlowe and the killer, Marlowe and the corrupt cop, really are pals, if only in the sense that they play by the same rules.

But where did the hard-boiled writers get the insulting usage of “pal”?  From actual gangsters?  From the gangster movies of the early 1930s?  From Hemingway, whose famous story “The Killers” features a very similar use of the insult “bright boy”?  Who knows?  Sometimes this history of words business is just too tough, pal.  Better leave it lay.