Before I launch into what it is about being greeted with “hey lovely” that irks me so much, please allow me a grammatical side note which proves I am nasty and picky, not “lovely” at all. There are some adjectives that can go it alone without a noun, but “lovely” is not one of them. So, when someone greets me with “hey lovely”, I feel like Mick Jagger waitin’ on a friend because I’m just waitin’ on a noun. “Lovely WHAT?”

Meanwhile, back in the local cafe, where the waitress—a twee young thing of less than a third my age— chirped “what’ll you have, lovely?”, “there you go, lovely” and “thanks lovely” at every interaction with me, and completely failed to call my incredibly lovely husband anything except when addressing both of us as “lovelies”.

Now, if I had walked in and handed a bunch of flowers to every staff member, then perhaps the greeting might have been warranted. But I didn’t. Nor have I ever done. They sell sad looking bunches on a stand out the front, anyway, so it would be redundant. It kind of felt sarcastically disrespectful to be called ‘lovelies’ when I, at least, am clearly not, so we probably wouldn’t go back there, except that the food and the ambience are both really lovely and it’s on our way to the chemist where we are frequent flyers.

For all that waitress knows, I could be Erin Paterson, the infamous ‘mushroom killer’ out on a day pass. I’m not Erin Paterson, although I think we look somewhat alike, but the growing angst I’m feeling at people who don’t know me calling me “lovely” is making me a little less lovely every time I hear it.

Surely we don’t want to live in a world where all human interactions are rigorously policed for evidence of condescension. Nor should we worry too much about clumsy icebreakers people use to spark conversation. Choosing the wrong word is better than saying nothing at all, isn’t it?

No. Not always —- “lovely” is a specific and quite personal word choice and when it’s delivered in a shallow, sing-song sort of way, it’s a grating combination that leaves me cold. And it’s not just waitresses—it’s the lady at the blood collection place after she’s struggled for ten minutes to find a productive enough vein, the woman to whom I responded on the Ipswich community page who could clearly see my name at the top of my comment in which I used her name, and … get this …the older (about my age) guy who swiped his card when the self-checkout machine at Coles froze. I noted he was calling men ‘champ’, so I winked at him and said, “thanks Tiger’, which is a pretty nice thing to call someone I reckon because I love my cat. Just wondering if he’d call, say, Gout Gout (the incredibly fast local Ipswich runner—nothing to do with my swollen feet) ‘champ’.

And so, in an “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” sort of a way, I am now in the process of trialling comeback greetings for when I am “lovelied”.

To date, I have used, “hey precious”, “hey treasure” and “hey pet” and, while none of these feel completely comfortable just yet, I am going to persist because, let’s face it, the alternative is that I do turn into a mushroom killer and that would not be lovely at all.

*Picture is of the (linguistic usage) police out and about in Ipswich on their high horses. I thought it was appropriate.