There comes a time when relationships turn intimate and it happens. 
Your other half forgets your name and decides to improvise. Or perhaps he decides to give a pet name a whirl. He digs down into the bargain bin of nicknames and tries a few on for size…
Love, hun, honey, darling…
All of which are ok by me. There’s an implied closeness that just seems so right when a relationship turns serious. Sometimes those nicknames are secret, shared only by you two and that’s lovely too….as long as they’re not weird pet names for your genitals, of course. I’ve never been convinced that calling one’s member Little John or ‘the big bad bedroom cobra’ has done much to enhance the sanctity of the lovers’ bed.
Then there are the more common nicknames that are my red rags!
I can do ‘hun’, ‘love’, ‘Vic’, ‘Vix’, and ‘darling’. If it’s my Mum or members of my close family I can even manage the old childhood nickname ‘Stick’ (I know things have changed A LOT since childhood!) but some popular nicknames set my teeth on edge.
On my cannot bear list is ‘baby’.
Or worse….barf.….’babe’.
I outgrew stretch n grows some years ago. In fact stretch n grows didn’t even exist when I was a baby! I see the term ‘babe’ as a diminutive term, almost derogatory term. And yes, I have fallen into the trap of uttering it myself, once or twice, and as my Englishman raised a disapproving eyebrow I did give myself a thorough flogging afterwards. ( No, I didn’t enjoy it!)
But apparently, I’m not the only one to abhor ‘babe’ and ‘baby’ as a nickname. According to the recently published list of vile nicknames on yahoo.com babe is listed as the number one reviled nickname.
But I can think of much, much worse.
Take schnookums. Who the hell thought of that?
Or ‘sweetie’, dearie, precious, or princess?
Then there’s all those Americanised ones – sweetcheeks, sugar lips, sexy legs, love muffin, (bleurgh!), sugar pie, and baby cakes.
BABY CAKES!!!
Are we advocating a mid-morning snack of infantile cannabalism dressed with hundreds and thousands and accompanied by tea?
And then there’s the awful sugar coated half-digs. Like ‘fattie’, ‘pumpkin’ or the one I absolutely detest – ‘Her Indoors’. You don’t hear that so much in any other country but Britain, but over here we hear it a great deal. I always shudder a little when I hear it, feeling that ‘her indoors’ paints a picture of an overbearing dominating housewife with a bosom the size of the Andes and multiple chins, who holds the keys to the house and her whimpering husband’s dog lead. The lead is inevitabily tied around his bollocks.
Then there’s all the cool nicknames that were kinda rude last time I looked. Like ‘slag’, ‘slapper’ and ‘biatch’. Did they become good things about the same time that ‘phat’ became cool?
I am soooo uncool. Obviously.
But I guess the weirdest nickname of all, is when someone doesn’t know you terribly well and calls you a shortened version of your name or the absolute inverse – people calling me Victoria for example – when that isn’t my full name. Both usages signal that the other person has assumed an intimacy with you, that doesn’t yet exist. When I hear that I cynically narrow my eyes.
Am I just having a sense of humour fail, or are there truly some awful ‘nicknames’ around at the moment? Nicknames that pretend to sound good but actually cover a multitude of menace?
What’s the worst nickname you’ve ever been called, or you’ve ever heard?
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