‘Hypocorism’ is another strange and wonderful word (hip-OCK-ah-riz-um.) The Oxford’s definition is: ‘pet name’. But there is a bit more to it than that. It is a pet name used to show affection for a person. So if I call my wife ‘honey’ that comes under this weird and wonderful word ‘hypocorism.’ And I suspect when someone christened ‘Margaret’ is known as ‘Molly’ that also counts. Some experts think it can be applied to any diminutive form of a familiar name – ‘Bob’ for ‘Robert’ and so on. In linguistics there is something called ‘morphology – the study of the shape of words, and of how words change their shape. And linguists use ‘hypocorism’ to name the morphological process by which the standard form of a word is turned into a positive abbreviation. Aussies do this all the time – turning ‘afternoon’ to ‘arvo’,’ ‘postman’ into ‘postie,’ and so on. The source word behind this originates in the Ancient Greek word for ‘to treat with tokens of affection’.When I was a small boy and my grandfather called me ‘Sunny Jim’ I suspect he intended it to be understood in this way.