What's the deal with 'howzit babe'?

I’m going to talk about “babe”. Not the movie or the attractive young woman, but the standard term of endearment amongst middle-class South Africans. It’s usually attached to greetings or questions. “Howzit babe” or “Babe, can you open this jar for me?” You hear it everywhere, usually in places like Montecasino or the Builders Warehouse in Fourways (although admittedly, there you will more likely hear “Babe, can we go now?”)

Ever since I was a student, I’ve been very aware of “babe” because pretty much everybody used it as a term of endearment for their significant others, and I never did. For me it was too familiar, too prosaic, too … normal. There’s so much social subtext wrapped up in calling somebody “babe” that I just can’t do it. It’s not who I am; I’d feel like I was trying to wear a scratchy tracksuit that didn’t fit properly. I suppose this is just (another) one of my issues, like my phobia about singing solo in front of an audience or my horror of peach fuzz.

In the mean time, “babe” is now used more widely than ever, and appears to be an essential ingredient in phatic speech: having little meaning within itself but serving an important social function. So women will use “babe” for both their male and female friends, though I think it’s fair to say that it’s still predominantly used by men as a sort of universal shorthand for all women on the planet ever. Just call them babe and you’ll never have to remember their names.

“Babe” can be applied to a man, provided of course the person using the word is a woman. No man would ever think of using it in that way. Other men are “boet”, “bru”, “china”, “dude”, “man” or “my man” — but never, ever “babe”.

I asked a few men whether they called women “babe” and got a variety of responses, most of them negative. It seems it’s something you either do or you don’t, and if you do use it, it implies a kind of casual confidence, especially if you use it for women other than your wife or girlfriend. It’s a word that is also indicative of a particular cultural orientation; after all, academic, intellectual types don’t go around saying “Howzit babe”. (Or at least, not that I’ve heard. They’re too busy deconstructing Ariel Dorfman’s Nelson Mandela lecture.)

Funnily enough, I liked it when my ex-boyfriend — he of the Hilux Double Cab, heavy metal and Long Island Iced Tea — called me “babe”, because it meant that I was a girlfriend like everyone else; it was an explicit acknowledgment of the familiarity between us. Also, it meant that miraculously, I was desirable and attractive enough to be called “babe” (even though that’s utterly illogical: presumably the partners of unattractive women also use the word). And yes, I was quite conscious of how it reminded me of the time at the beginning of second year when I sat during Orientation Week with a male friend who rated every single woman who passed as a “babe” or a “moose”.

I knew exactly which category I fitted into.

Being called babe by a boyfriend evoked an ordinariness that I found comforting. When I was “babe”, I was drawn into the logic of that rather flaccid cultural dynamic where success is measured by the size of the SUV in the garage of your cluster house. It’s a culture of beer (in green glass, note), Sunday braais and watching rugby on your 42-inch plasma screen. None of this existential crisis bullshit, none of this questioning of purpose or search for meaning, unless meaning lies in that line in your bank statement that records the size of your mortgage.

Which leads me to a question, in a roundabout and not necessarily entirely logical way. Does familiarity breed contempt, or contempt breed familiarity (the way people driving expensive cars call the petrol attendant “my man”)? The use of monikers that infer familiarity when in fact you aren’t close to someone is a subtle assumption of power and a way of putting the other in his or her place. Like the SMS I got from a contact who had somehow survived my last foray into internet dating and who, knowing that I was sick in bed, sent a message reading “Mwah how u feeling my babe”. That’s the sort of message I’d expect from a boyfriend, not somebody I haven’t actually met. He’s trying to nudge me into girlfriend territory without my consent, and I’m not happy about it. (As for “mwah”, that’s another essay on its own.) Since when am I anybody’s babe anyway? “Babe” after all is a truncated version of “baby”, which signifies not only nurturing and caring, but also weakness and helplessness.

I am probably over analysing this — of course I am over analysing this — but again and again I see how language is used to construct and maintain identity and power, and I am interested in this because we very rarely think about what we do. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say; most of us would rather veg in front of SA Idols than run off a quick critical discourse analysis of the content of what the okes discussed at Hooters.

But it is also true that people say all sorts of things without realising what they are actually communicating. Next time you hear an oke say “Howzit babe”, think about what that might mean.