daddy

   A diminutive of ‘Dad’, used mainly by young children to their father. Women are likely to continue using it rather longer than men, but at some stage there is usually a switch to ‘Dad’, and later perhaps, to ‘Father’. ‘Daddy’ is used in a friendly way by a young man to an older man in Absolute Beginners, by Colin MacInnes. In An American Dream, by Norman Mailer, a black American man says to a white policeman who is hitting him: ‘That’s the way, daddy, you’re improving all the time.’ It is possible that ‘Daddy’ is used as an intimacy by a woman to her ‘sugar-daddy’, though no examples of such usage occurred in the present corpus. The God-Seeker, by Sinclair Lewis, has a scene where a pastor is with a father and his son. The son calls his father ‘Dad’, and at one point the pastor addresses the older man as ‘Daddy’ + last name. The father interrupts him immediately to say: ‘Not your daddy, thank God - or don’t think so.’