Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Folksy, Being

A polite librarian should always refer to library patrons and colleagues with charming folksy names like darling, buddy, sweetie, sweetheart, champ, sport, honey, tiger, baby, babe, or dear.  Your deliberately calculated efforts to sound like someone's grandmother will be a great complement to your cardigan, your glasses on a chain, and the bowl of hard candy you keep on your desk.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, but it's more fun to come up with better names, like "Metaphysical Man", "law library guy", and "Avoid this guy like the plague"

David W said...

Have to be careful, though, or on some Thursday afternoon when you're feeling especially spunky/loopy, you'll find yourself using such soubriquettes as "Fella", "Big Fella", "Great Old Big Fella", "y'old coot, you!", "Miss Sassy Pants", "Honey Britches", "Buster", "Pal", "Bub", "Stinker", "Crazy Joe", "Scooter", "mister muffin man", "Big Chief", "tiny twin", "snookums", "apple blossom", "loverboy", "puddin'" etc. etc.

AareneX said...

In our building, "Pumpkin" is the nickname of choice (also pronounced "Punkin," depending on the age/regional origin of the speaker).

It's cute, non-threatening, and not age- or gender-specific.

Heather B. said...

I have actually found myself referring to children (to their faces!) as "kiddo." What has happened to me?

Anonymous said...

沈舟側畔千帆過，病樹前頭萬木春............................................................

Anonymous said...

When speaking with boy-children, I tend to call them "Bud."

Julia said...

Like Heather B I often use "kiddo". I don't work on the children's desk enough to know the kids names, but I do know their faces. I think they are lucky I don't call them "brat" or "devil's spawn".

I do sometimes great my teens with a cheerful "what's up, buttercup?", especially the males.

 
http://libetiquette.blogspot.com/2010/07/folksy-being.html
libetiquette.blogspot.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-30
78347
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DZIV52KM6EKFOPLUMW7PQIBZOFGJEDER
<urn:uuid:8609e1b5-96ea-4903-b2bb-51d02fab2ad7>
2018-07-18T18:16:51Z
172.217.15.97
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:HCNCRP4OBSLOXIRLAJWWKJYIZPNSUH3M
<urn:uuid:d4da0d07-8449-4aff-b6cf-79934295c993>
http://libetiquette.blogspot.com/2010/07/folksy-being.html
response
<urn:uuid:ef25eb7d-259a-4883-8821-811a84677131>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-228-146-196.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-30
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf