Terms of Endearment
TIME OUT NEW YORK
JULY 26-AUGUST 1, 2007
JULIA ALLISON
I once had a roommate in college who shunned the usual terms of endearment – the babys, the sweeties, even the pumpkins – and instead affectionately dubbed her boyfriend “Pooper.” He, (because really, how does one top that?), also called her Pooper. Did I mention they said it in baby voices? They did.
Ew?
Yeah, yeah, a rose by any other name and all that. I get it. But really ... POOPER??
Actually, despite my aversion to romantic monikers involving bodily functions, I’m a big fan of personalized (if perplexing) pet names, myself. They’re unique! They can’t be reused, like the all-purpose “honey”! They speak of a connection deeper and more intimate than the one-size-fits-all “darling”! And yeah, sometimes only you and your partner understand them. My ex Alex and I called each other Bidden #1 and Bidden #2 for years. Which might have been cuter if the term hadn’t started out as a nickname for my shih-tzu puppies. Or maybe their furry origin is what makes them cute in the first place.
Pet names that began as actual pet names are more common than you’d think. Rachel, 34, a lawyer, explains that she called her ex “Schnoogie,” a nickname for her dog. “He would be like, ‘I’m not a fucking dog,’ and then laugh.’” Jeff, 30, an editor, and his wife, Carina, 30, a doctor, call each other “Chicken,” originally their cat’s name.
“First of all, we started doing it because that's what old man Karamazov calls his little prostitute in The Brother Karamazov, so it has major highbrow bona fides,” he says. “Except that we didn't actually start doing it to each other. It was what we called our cat. But then we had to give the cat back to my sister, and we had this great nickname and no cat to use it on.”
Or sometimes the epithets just sound like what you’d name your animal.
“I like to call my man Spot and he calls me Killer,” says Natalie, 25, an artist. Aww. “And if you think that’s cute, my dad calls my mom ‘The dead vessel.’ I think it means that they are done having children. Whatever. ‘Is the dead vessel speaking again?’ he'll say with this grin on his face. My mom calls my dad ‘sperm donor.’ Yup. The love runs pretty deep in our household.”
Some couples use pet names to the exclusion of all else. “Nicole only ever calls me ‘Nate’ if she’s angry, and likewise, it freaks her out if I call her ‘Nicole,’” says Nate, 32, a reporter, of his girlfriend of almost two years. “My main pet name for her is ‘biscuit.’ Sometimes I call her ‘pickle,’ which she doesn’t like as much. When she’s PMSing I call her Crazylove, which she doesn’t like at all.”
Pickle? How ... romantic? Although, that wasn’t the weirdest I heard over the course of researching couples’ nicknames. Try: “Llama,” “Blanket,” “Colt,” “Tiger Twinkies,” and “Moo.”
“I had a French beau who called me PETIT CHOU and MA PUCE - which means my little cabbage and my flea – and I wondered – are these COMPLIMENTS???” says Karen Salmanson, host of the Sirius radio show Be Happy Damnit. She got off easy. “Had he been from el Salvador I would have been called MI GORDITA -- which means MY FATTY!”
“My sister dated a guy she called ‘Fish Boy,’” says Brent, 25, writer. “And a guy I used to work with called his girlfriend ‘Dead Tooth Crack Ho’ (which is a surprisingly descriptive pet name).”
Wow. Pooper’s starting to sound pretty good.
Still, some people aren’t big fans of odd, overly gushy love handles. “Pet names are for little dogs that fit in handbags, not the person you love,” says Jeremy, 33, a lawyer. “Why? Because it’s cutesie, juvenile crap, people are people, not pets. Pet names belong in high school relationships not between adults.”
And sometimes the pet name is favored by the giver but not so much the recipient. Angela, 23, in PR, generally uses “babe” with her boyfriend of over a year, but his name for her isn’t quite so … welcome. “Despite hailing from New York, I managed to pick up the nickname ‘Jerze’ in college, thanks to his frat brothers. More insulting is that a girl he hooked up with right before was from Connecticut. She, apparently, was Jerze #1, leaving me as Jerze #2. I guess when you go to college in Virginia, anyone from the tri-state area is somehow ‘Jersey trash.’ Poor New Jersey.”
“He’s not allowed to call me ‘Jerze #2’ to my face anymore, though,” she reassures me.
“I once knew a guy who called his girlfriend ‘Honey,’” says Jane, 32, a writer. “which we all thought was so sweet until he admitted (not to her) that he did it when he couldn't remember her name. She married someone else. He’s still single.”
See? Use terms of endearment blasphemously and you’ll be smote.
CHECK IT OUT
There’s a nickname generator online that asks you to type in your first and last name, and it will generate creative terms of endearment for you. When I typed in my name, it came up with: “Puppie pot chocolate kisses bon bon.” Not sure how they derived that from Julia Allison, but ...um ... I suppose at least it’s imaginative. Although when I typed in the name of a friend, it came up with “Butter Hot Pooh Peepers.” I might just use that one instead.