duck

   Popular terms of endearment since at least the seventeenth century. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Nick Bottom as Pyramus utters his famous ‘O dainty duck! O dear!’ to Thisbe, otherwise Flute. There is a less well-known Shakespearean use of ducks in Troilus and Cressida (4:iv). Pandarus greets Troilus with ‘Ah, sweet ducks!’

   In modern Britain ‘duck’ or ‘me duck’ continues to be well used as a friendly term of address in the Midlands, while ‘ducks’ is perhaps the more popular London form. Unconditional Surrender, by Evelyn Waugh, has: “‘Just off, ducks,” she said, using a form of address that had become prevalent during the Blitz.’ In the more recent novel Up the City Road, by John Stroud, ‘ducks’ is used by a policeman in London to address a young woman. It occurs also as a friendly vocative in The Half Hunter, by John Sherwood; The Limits of Love, by Frederic Raphael (where ‘ducky’ is also used); Room at the Top, by John Braine. These scattered instances in no way compare with the forty-nine examples of duck that occur in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, by Alan Sillitoe, which reflects working-class Nottingham life.

   Middle-class speakers also make use of ‘duck’, but tend to make it part of a longer expression. ‘But darling duck,’ says a very middle-class English woman to an intimate woman friend in Don’t Tell Alfred, by Nancy Mitford, ‘we can’t keep them here.’ ‘Stop crying, Crystal, my duck,’ says a middleclass man to a woman in The Word Child, by Iris Murdoch. ‘You little duck’ is used by a boy to his young sister in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, There seems to be no particular pattern about the use of the diminutive ‘ducky’, or ‘duckie’ as it is often spelt. It occurs, e.g., in Kate and Emma, by Monica Dickens; The Country Girls, by Edna O’Brien. and Thirteen Days, by Ian Jefferies, each time as what seems to be an arbitrary variant of ‘duck’ or ‘ducks’. It is more frequently used in AngloSaxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson, because it is made a feature of one character’s idiolect. In Gigolo and Gigolette, a short story by Somerset Maugham, a husband says to his wife: ‘Will you stay here, ducky, or would you like to go to your dressing room?’ Used by a man to a woman in this way, this term is friendly if not intimate.

   There are some who would associate the use of ‘ducky’ by a male speaker to almost anyone of his acquaintance, male or female, with homosexuality. Whether this is a justifiable assumption or not probably depends on the area the speaker comes from. ‘Duck’ and its variants are rarely found in novels written by American authors, though The Philanderer, by Stanley Kauffmann, has a man greeting his mistress with: ‘Hello, duck, how are you?’ The Oxford English Dictionary reports that ‘duckling’ was at one time used as an endearment, but this usage appears to have died out.