babe

   This word has been overtaken in general use by its own diminutive form, ‘baby’. It was still the more common form in Shakespeare’s time, and occurs as a vocative in The Winter’s Tale (2:iii) where Antigonus says to the infant Perdita: ‘Come on, poor babe,/Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens/To be thy nurses.’ He has just been instructed to take the infant ‘to some remote and desert place’ and abandon it. ‘Babe’ is rarely used in normal modern speech, though a highly literary character in Laura, by Vera Caspary, addresses a woman friend as ‘my dear babe’. More usually today ‘babe’ represents an abbreviated form of ‘baby’. The Choirboys, by Joseph Wambaugh, has a Los Angeles policeman saying to his junior partner: ‘Remember one thing, babe, don’t never try to overtake a fast car on the outside when you’re going in a turn.’ This form is extended to ‘babes’ in The Philanderer, by Stanley Kauffmann, where an American greets his wife with ‘Lynn, babes, what’s the matter?’ The Critic, by Wilfred Sheed, has a similar ‘Nice going. Max babes’, said by one American man to another.