Honey
“Sweetie, it's yours, kicking in doors”
“If anyone called me "Honey," it was standing in the bathroom, white teeth”
“We can bed down, pick me up, who's the baddest in the land?”
the bathroom and the weaponised pet name
“If anyone called me "honey" / It was standing in the bathroom, white teeth / They were saying that skirt don't fit me / And I cried the whole way home”
“We cry tears of mascara in the bathroom / Honey, life is just a classroom” — New Romantics
Readers pair the breezy 1989 line — "honey" as an endearment, the bathroom as life's classroom — with Honey's wounded retelling eleven years on: the same pet name turned into a put-down, the same bathroom, the crying repeated. Across the two songs the word travels from affection to cruelty and is finally reclaimed, the later song answering the earlier one's casual brightness with what it had cost.