baby-doll, you

   An expression of the 1920s in the USA, expressing admiration for a young lady on the part of a young man. The expression was not always appreciated by women of the time. In Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, occurs: She was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen to twenty who loafed before Dyer’s Drug Store, smoking cigarettes, displaying ‘fancy’ shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, ‘Oh, you baby-doll’ at every passing girl. The expression is apparently not extinct: in Daughters of Mulberry, by Roger Longrigg, ‘baby doll’ is used as a friendly vocative by an English woman to a man who is a stranger to her. A Woman Called Fancy, by Frank Yerby, has an American man using it to a young woman, equating it with ‘honeychild’ and ‘baby’. In My Side of the Matter, a short story by Truman Capote, it is a young wife who says to her husband, ‘Go on, babydoll,’ Chapman’s Dictionary of American Slang mentions that males can occasionally be addressed by the ‘baby’ terms.