Title : A dispute over "sweetie."
link : A dispute over "sweetie."
A dispute over "sweetie."
I'm seeing this:Nope. Just good old fashioned acid-laced sarcasm. Not gender-specific. Nice try though, honey bun. https://t.co/6oHJhUDUOC— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) November 25, 2018
The one thing these 2 lovebirds agree on is that "sweetie" is an old, old word. So I looked it up in the OED. As a word referring to a person (as opposed to a sweetmeat) first appeared in print in 1778 in a song you can sing to the tune of "O Kitten, My Kitten":
That's "sweet-ee," not "fweet-ee," though "fweet-ee" is good if you do baby talk with your sweetie.
Anyway, nice Revolutionary War song. It ends "Let Georgy do all in his power/It will not drink green or bohea-a/The baby will thrive ev'ry hour/And America live and be free-a."
There's a gap in the OED quotes from that old "sweet-ee"/"fweet-ee" in 1778 to 1925 when we see the word in "The Great Gatsby": "Tom's the first sweetie she ever had."
As for "honey bun," it first appears — as the OED has it — in 1902 in something called "Girl Proposition": "It was an Omnibus Love that reached out its red-hot Tentacles and twined around all Objects..associated with little Honey-Bun." There's also this cool quote from 2000 ("Lion's Game"): "You'd be surprised how many spouses don't give a rat's ass if the murderer of their departed honey-bun is found." But let me send you off with the cool little song from "South Pacific":
No! Wait a minute. Come back! I just discovered the most important "sweetie" conflict ever. It's about Obama! Here's a 2008 column from the language writer Ben Zimmer.
Last week on the Visual Thesaurus, William Safire and Nancy Friedman both weighed in on "Bittergate," the political furor that arose over Senator Barack Obama's comments about small-town Pennsylvanian voters ("It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion"). Now Obama has found himself under the microscope again for his use of a particular word, but this time the context is more "sweet" than "bitter." Responding to a question from television reporter Peggy Agar at an automobile plant outside of Detroit, Obama said, "Hold on one second, sweetie." Later he left Agar a voicemail apologizing about using the word sweetie to address her, calling it a "bad habit of mine." Lisa Anderson of the Chicago Tribune wryly wrote, "Welcome to 'Sweetie-gate,' a place paved with eggshells, where terms of endearment turn into political peccadilloes at the drop of a diminutive."...
Obama told Agar that he meant "no disrespect"... But even if Obama did not intend his use of sweetie as offensive, observers agreed that it was hardly an appropriate word for a presidential candidate to use when addressing a female reporter, running the risk of sounding dismissive or condescending to a professional woman....
Obama's "Sweetie-gate" opened an opportunity for pundits to mull over the acceptable social boundaries for terms of endearment, particularly those used by men to refer to women. In the Detroit Free Press, Mitch Albom writes that sugar, gorgeous, and cutie pie are "OK from your grandmother, your aunt or the 80-year-old immigrant dressmaker who says, 'OK, gorgeous, are you ready for your fitting?' But from a politician, a business associate or a stranger on a bus, they're bad."...
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