Interestingly, depending on where you are, these terms aren't gender-specific.
In the UK midlands it's quite common for older women to use exactly the same terms on younger men.
As someone who's not from there but spent significant amounts of time there when I was a young man, this is proper weird.
(Just for clarification, I didn't call the people using these terms weird. I'm from a region where terms like that are reserved for romantic partners or maybe your children, so it was weird to me getting adressed with very intimate terms by strangers.)
Yeah I live in the US and I hear women talk like this to men all the time, especially in restaurants. It’s a lot of the time more of a where you’re from kind of thing. Anyone who gets offended by this stuff is crazy.
I don’t get offended, but it’s always been a nails-on-a-chalkboard moment for me (a man) when a female server calls me “hon” or make a retail/service worker calls me “boss”. I wouldn’t presume to do the reverse, and I don’t have a choice of who’s doing the transaction.
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u/Square-Singer Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
Interestingly, depending on where you are, these terms aren't gender-specific.
In the UK midlands it's quite common for older women to use exactly the same terms on younger men.
As someone who's not from there but spent significant amounts of time there when I was a young man, this is proper weird.
(Just for clarification, I didn't call the people using these terms weird. I'm from a region where terms like that are reserved for romantic partners or maybe your children, so it was weird to me getting adressed with very intimate terms by strangers.)