I call men 'love' because I'm from Yorkshire and it's just what we do - Ian McMillan

He replied, not with Love or Pal or Mate, which are very common these days, but with ‘My mate’, which is unusual, and notable because it’s unusual.

Over the years I’ve collected these terms of male endearment and I have to say that ‘My mate’ is one of the rarer ones. I guess it’s like a extension of Mate but one that implies something more powerful, something more bonded. You could imagine hugging somebody you called ‘my mate’ but you’d only shake hands with a Mate. I didn’t hug the bloke in the café, of course. We’d only just met.

I find Mate and Pal quite aggressive, I have to say. Depending on the way people say it, those words can imply that you’re not their mate or their pal and, moreover, you wouldn’t want to be. My Mate is softer, I think, and gentler.

If somebody blindfolded me and drove me around the country and then dropped me on a sidestreet somewhere I reckon I could work out where I was on the map by the names people addressed me as. If somebody called me Duck then I know I’d be in Nottinghamshire. If somebody called me Me Duck then I’d be somewhere on the Nottinghamshire/Leicestershire border.

If somebody called me La I’d be in Liverpool and if somebody called me Hinny I’d be in the North East, as I would if they called me Man. If they called me Hen I’d be in Scotland and if they called me My Lover I’d be in Cornwall. If they called me Marra I’d be in a different part of the North East and if they called me John I’d be somewhere in the South, as I would be if they called me Mush, or Chief.

So far, so good. So far, so recognisable. I like the tiny variations, though; I like the endearments that have almost died out but which somehow still survive. Fatha is one that I often used to hear in Sheffield, often accompanied by a word that you have to write down as Waaaay but which when rendered in print doesn’t capture its true beauty, so that two Sheffielder meeting each other on the street would say ‘Waaay fatha!’, a locution that you rarely hear in the Steel City in 2023.

Prince was something a lad from Newark I was at college with used to call people and it had a brief flourishing in our sociolology seminars in 1975. Me and my college mates used to call each other Comrade because some of lecturers did, and a lad from the USA who dropped out after the first year called people Blood.

The late Charlie Williams used to call people Flower, and that term of endearment is almost a late term too, these days, as is its minor variation Me Old Flower and Me Old Flower Pot.

I love all of these words and I wish them a long and happy linguistic life. Apart from one, and that word is Sunshine. I don’t like it when people call me Sunshine because it always feels like they’re about to start arguing with me. The word itself feels like the opposite of real sunshine to me. It sheds no light.

No sunshine for me, Love!