dear, old

   Used with genuine affection, as one might expect, in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson, where it occurs four times as an intimacy between husband and wife. The term could be used to either sex; in this instance it is the wife who uses it to address her husband. In Every Day is Ladies’ Day, a short story by Dawn Powell, a man says to a woman in her fifties: ‘I didn’t tell you even half about it, old dear.’ ‘Old dear yourself!’ she snaps at him. Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, has sarcastic use of the term by a young American man to his employer, an older man, who is dismissing him. ‘Babbitt, old dear, you’re crooked in the first place and a damn skinflint in the second.’