honey-child

   Often written as ‘honey-chile’ to indicate its pronunciation, and associated especially with the American South. As H.L. Mencken says, in The American Language, Southern speech has suffered cruelly on the stage and in the movies, where kittenish actresses from the North think they have imitated it sufficiently when they have thrown in a few you-alls and honeychiles and converted every I into a long ah. Support for Mencken’s view comes from E.V. Cunningham, in Lydia. A man says to a woman who has been trying to pass herself off as a Texan: ‘“ZHoney child - did you ever really listen to that southern accent of yours?” “It got by.” “Come off it, kid. It did not get by.”’ A Woman Called Fancy, by Frank Yerby, has a white American living in Georgia addressing a young white woman as ‘honey-child’, equating it with ‘babydoll’ and ‘baby’.