A couple questions

[mutuisanimis]

1) Do kids drink hot cocoa or hot chocolate? I've seen various and sometimes conflicting definitions of these. Can it be shortened just to cocoa?

2) What would a little kid call his father? Dad/Daddy/Papa/Da/Father/etc?

3) What might a father call his son as a term of endearment? Specifically, would "little man" sound out of place? I read this

Comments

[eofs]

1) Cocoa (not sure I've heard it called hot cocoa here) and hot chocolate aren't the same thing. Cocoa is based on cocoa powder, hot chocolate is based on chocolate. So both are acceptable, but mean different things. I've never drunk cocoa, but I'm sure many children are given it - especially if it's something their parents enjoy, or did as children themselves.

2) Daddy would be the most common for a young child, but all sorts of variants exist which are dependent, to varying degrees, on class, location etc. Daddy is pretty safe though.

3) Little man sounds awkward to me in that context. Trouble is fine, or sprog, but I wouldn't overuse either of them.

[sushidog]

1. Cocoa or hot chocolate; I don't think I've ever heard "hot cocoa" except as part of "some nice hot cocoa", if you see what I mean. These days, hot chocolate could well be instant hot chocolate, where you just add water, where cocoa would be made with milk and cocoa powder and sugar, but they can be used synonymously.

2. depends a bit on age and background; "dad" is pretty much universal, "daddy" is used by younger children and, to a lesser extent, posh kids. "Papa" went out of style half a century ago. "Da" I've only heard in Irish families. Father is rather formal, I think I would only use it jokingly.

3. "Little man" works, yes, as do Trouble, Sprog, Tiger, or all sorts of family nicknames; in one family I know, the two boys are often called, respectively, Toad and Bear.

[sollersuk]

Agreed with others about first two.

"Little man" sounds very weird to me. It's more likely to be a family nickname than the other two ("sprog" is somewhat Royal Navy related). As to the sample sentence, we would never say "let's go do"; it would always be "let's go and do"; we don't use "go" as a quasi-modal verb.

[lil_shepherd]

I don't have any military friends, but despite this, the ones with children use 'sprog' a lot.

[ias]

Sprog is RAF not Navy, iirc.

[willibald]

We tend to call our seven year old son "little man" particularly when he needs comforting.

[helle_d]

1) Cocoa is unsweetened, so somebody making a cup of cocoa would add hot water/milk and sugar to taste. Even though I drink mysef from time to time, for me it still seems an old-fashioned drink that makes me think of children in wartime adventure stories or Enid Blyton. Hot chocolate is the default drink, made with either instant hot chocolate powder and water, or 'proper' hot chocolate powder and milk. Or melted chocolate or gourmet 'chocolate shavings' if you want to make an Occaision out of it.

2) Just about any paternal term could be justified as a regional/family-specific name, but Daddy is the most common.

3) All of those seem possible. Also 'lad' 'kid', 'our kid' or 'our (Name)' werre the first alternatives that came to mind. I'd say these are fairly Northern though, don't know if they'd be used further south.