Two stories:
I recently helped a customer who kept calling me “honey”. Drove me crazy. First time he said it, I said, “Please don’t call me honey. My name is xJane.” He didn’t blink & did it again. The second time I dropped the “please” and the second sentence. The third time, I said it rather loudly & annoyedly, causing some entertaining glances & stares. It seemed to kick him out of his paternalistic mindset for at least a few minutes (he didn’t do it again).
I just got lunch at the local taco stand, which I love, and got called “señorita” by the owner. I smiled & we caught up, since apparently I’m a regular now. It made me remember the “honey” episode, though, since the diminutive (surely I’m a señora by now under any definition, but I’m younger than him) didn’t bother me.
I’ve decided it’s all about the tone and familiarity. I’ve been called honey, sweetie, deah (dear, for those not from Maine), and many of the like in many different languages. Sometimes it bothers me and sometimes it doesn’t. The difference is in how it seems like it’s meant. In the first instance, “honey” kept being followed by similar condescensions, implications that I didn’t know my job, and odd looks. In the second, a warm smile & greeting preceded the diminutive. In the first instance, I felt like I was being treated as something less than the speaker; like a child who had stumbled into an adult world. In the second, I felt I was being treated as familiar (literally, “like family”). Technically, I suppose, “honey” is an endearment and “señorita” is a diminutive (literally, “something smaller”); but it was in the first instance that I felt smaller and the last that I felt endeared.
I have found that diminutives are often used by men and women from other cultures. This was true in each of the cases above, both spoke English with a slight accent, but certainly well enough for us to communicate (enough for the first man, for example, to have understood that he was annoying me; enough for the second not to have slipped into Spanish). I’m not certain that this is because it’s “okay” in these other cultures to act familiarly or if they know they can get away with it because they’re from another country (how many British women have called me “love”?).
It’s a fine line, obviously, between familiarity and condescension. I think the key here is don’t be linguistically familiar if you’re not socially familiar. In the first case, I had not met this man who called me honey, nor have I seen him since. In the second, I see the (dare I say gentle-)man often, and had seen him often before this particular linguistic episode. I’m struggling to think of familiar terms I use. I call people “dude” an awful lot, a habit I’m trying to break; yet somehow I see this as less familiar than “honey”.
