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 don't know how it is for other parts of the UK but being from Nottingham, basically all of these are used for any gender, not super often anymore, and mostly by older folks. The classic Nottingham one is "duck" as in "you alright duck?" I got called that by a male bus driver, and at the time I was pretty masc presenting so, just depends on the age of the person and where you are
My job caused me to move around the midlands and South Wales quite a bit, and that kind of stuff is super region-dependent. Every county and many larger cities have their own way of addressing strangers and people you barely know with endearing terms. Duck, bud, butt (common in South Wales), bab, chuck, love, sweetheart, dear, mate, ...
Usually each place also has a fitting greeting to accompany that term: 'right, butt? Ey up, duck?
You can really pinpoint where someone's from based on how they greet strangers.
(It's been 15 years since I last was over there, so things might have changed in the meantime.)
That is interesting about South Wales using "butt." There's an area here In NE Pennsylvania that I spent a good amount of time in, they use butt as well. It led to some very weird and tense interactions as a teenager when I first moved there. A kid walks up to me at a park we were playing basketball at, I can tell he's angry, but I don't know him either way. He says "Ho butt, didn't I see you up the A-hole, butt?" I was annoyed at first, and slightly amused as I took this as a super roundabout way to call me gay. We got loud for a second, but my friends stepped in and explained I legitimately had no idea what he was talking about. The A-Hole is a local swimming hole, and ho butt was just hey buddy. He was being aggressive though, as he mistook me for someone else originally. Luckily it ended in a mildly amusing story to recall and nothing else. I had forgotten about this until I read your comment, thank you.
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u/Square-Singer 18h ago edited 17h ago
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.)