Of Lambie-pies and Devilishly Divine Munchkins

Terms of endearment never change. What your grandfather called your grandmother, your mother called your dad; and finally there you are, cooing on the couch, saying the same moronic words: Darling, Honey, Cup-cake, Sweets. Terms of endearment so diabetically sweet. How easily they spill, the junk food of language.

Not that this nonsense is without order or a sense of originality. Of terms of endearment there seems to be six main types: animal, edible, ethereal, infantile, hybrids and the odd-balls. Animal terms include Lamb or Lambkins, Ducks, Mouse, Bear and the once popular Pussy-cat, which is now sort of defunct because of its similarity to a rather more cuss term. Among the edibles are Pumpkin, Dumpling and a smorgasbord of other unhealthy junk and baked foods. Ethereal: Angel, Cupid. Infantile: Baby, Munchkin. The hybrids are, obviously, combinations of the above, such as Lambie-pie and Honey-bear. The odd-balls are ambiguous etymological bastards and constantly mutating to suit the idiocity of the love stricken fool: snookums and tinky-winky. There are also physically and emotionally descriptive terms such as Heart-throb, Hunk and cuddles. All of which have taken up residence in the English language.

The French call their dear ones cabbages and rabbits. The Germans, little treasure. We Indians call ours jalebis and ladoos. We have created these words as verbal comforters, warm safety zones, wherein anyone, no matter high and mighty, is free to sound like a nitwit.

Thus you would probably find the upright tight-arsed army Sergeant, the terror and bane of new recruits at boot-camp, cooing over his little “chickadee”. Even your prudish prune-of-an-english-teacher would have her moments of sweet senility: “My sugar plum lil’bun and my darling huggy-buggy bunchkins”.

Might it be possible to come up with more sophisticated, outlandish words to bespeak our affection for one another? It would not be necessary to create excessively intellectual terms, but our wooing language might at least keep pace with the times. Or should we??

During these times when going plump is your worst nightmare next to being a virgin and you probably got to fight the wolves of diabetes just cuz one of your ancestors had a sweet tooth and nature decided to hold a grudge against your whole line, would you be calling your love “ My wonderfully divine dumbbells”?.. or “ you are the insulin-shot of my life”. Would a pilot call his girl “My darling cock-pit”?(Oh the profane ambiguity of that pun !!).

But all this is quite thankfully unlikely. We will never abandon the old terminology, no matter how inane they be. For one thing, words like Precious and Toots may sound silly, but they are indispensable when one has forgotten the name of the person to whom affection is expressed. For another they remove formality from convivial situations. “Good night, Bhaskar,” sounds considerably colder than “Bedtime, Snookums”. Then, too, these words work excellently as short hand palliatives. In the Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart calls Mary Astor “Angel” as he turns her over to the cops. When you finally want to ditch that chic from last weeks booze-fest who’s now starting to grow on you like the mould, try some sweet talk. The words might probably soften the shock.

Still the principal reason for hanging on these terms is that people in love generally are silly people, so its only fitting that they sound as silly as possible. Come February next year, such silliness will blossom in riotous splendour, when Dearests and Darlings will once again spread like cream over the continents, and Huggy-bears and Lambie-pies would frolic in utter abandon and the world will heave and deflate in one vast, swoonish sigh.