A jackanapes is a cheeky and impertinent young man. You jackanapes, an insolent jackanapes, some jackanapes of a clerk.
It is thoroughly archaic and survives as a comic insult in historical fiction. It began as a mocking nickname for a fifteenth-century duke, and it once meant a tame monkey, which is where the cheek comes from.
1nounjackanapesA cheeky and impertinent young man.
“"Get out of my shop, you young jackanapes!" shouted the old shopkeeper.”
jackanapes is a person.
From a mocking nickname for William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, and later a word for a tame monkey.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵenh₁-
Middle English
iack napys
English, today
jackanapes
Built from
From Middle English iack napys, iac nape, iac napes (“derogatory nickname of the English military commander and statesman William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk (1396–1450)”), probably from Jacun or Jakin (“pet forms of the male name Jack”) + ape (“ape, monkey”) + -s (possibly modelled after surnames such as Hobbes and Jakkes), referring to Suffolk’s heraldic badge which was an ape’s chain and clog (“weight such as a block of wood or log attached to an animal to hinder motion”) (see the image, right). It is uncertain whether the word was first coined as a nickname for Suffolk (the earliest known uses), or to refer to an ape or an ape-like person. If the word was originally a nickname, some early uses of apelike person (“person thought to behave like an ape or monkey”) may allude to Suffolk who was widely regarded as an upstart, having risen from the merchant class. In later uses, the middle element of the word was often treated as the indefinite article a or an, that is, as if the word meant “Jack, an ape”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire