Lacan: The 'opacity of the ejaculations of love, when, lacking a signifier to name the object of its epithalamium, it employs the crudest trickery of the imaginary. "I'll eat you up....Sweetie!" "You'll love it...Rat!". Psychiatrist Eric Berne identified the marital game of "Sweetheart", where 'White makes a subtly derogatory remark about Mrs White, disguised as anecdote, and ends: "Isn't that right, sweetheart?" Mrs. White tends to agree...because it would seem surly to disagree with a man who calls one "sweetheart" in public'. Berne points out that 'the more tense the situation, and the closer the game is to exposure, the more bitterly is the word "sweetheart" enunciated'; while the wife's antithesis is either 'to reply: "Yes, honey!"' or to 'respond with a similar "Sweetheart" type anecdote about the husband, saying in effect, "You have a dirty face too, dear"'. French has all kinds of interesting terms of endearment, including a rather odd assortment of barnyard animals...[like] mon canard (my duck)' – something which may be compared to the British 'baby talk...duckie'. Literary anecdotes In C. P. Snow's Last Things, the narrator's wife, faced with their son's unconventional marriage, turns to her husband and says: " 'Tell me, Lewis' (actually she used a pet name which meant she needed me) 'is that a real marriage?' " Virginia Woolf – 'Mandril or Marmoset for Leonard' her husband – wrote 'the story "Lappin and Lapinova", published in 1938, which describes the death of a marriage when the erotic, escapist fantasy of the animal names is cruelly killed off by the husband'. See also Diminutive Hypocorism Nickname References Further reading Latin Terms of Endearment and of Family Relationship: A Lexicographical Study Based on Volume VI of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum; By Samuel Glenn Harrod, 1909, University of Michigan. A Woman's Place: Rhetoric and Readings for Composing Yourself and Your Prose by Shirley Morahan, Published by SUNY Press, 1981, , . The Cambridge French-English Thesaurus by Marie-Noëlle Lamy, Richard Towell, Published by Cambridge University Press, 1998, , . Nicknames, Pet Names, and Metaphors Casnig, John D. 1997–2009. A Language of Metaphors. Kingston, Ontario, Canada: Knowgramming.com Sociolinguistics Interpersonal relationships Romance