Wifey and Hubby

Do we really need these words?

Last week my college buddy had shared on Facebook: “On a long drive with wifey!” and tagged his wife.

‘Wifey’?

I had to read that again to ensure he had said ‘wifey’ and not ‘WiFi’! Wouldn’t be surprising if the latter were true since people these days are more in love with WiFi than anyone or anything else.
“On a long drive, with WiFi” — looks legit.

But who or what is ‘wifey’? I googled and found out that wifey is an informal word for wife.
Okay. Good.
But what’s wrong with the word ‘wife’? Why replace it with a longer word?

When I shared this predicament with my other friends, they gave me a similar example that John is informally called Johnny. Does this mean that adding a ‘y’ at the end of a word can make it informal? Will changing my name from ‘Abhishek’ to ‘Abhisheky’ make my name sound more friendly?

I wasn’t convinced.
My friends didn’t give up on convincing me and told me that if a husband can be called hubby, then why can’t wife be called wifey?
The word length is same — 5 letters each. Doesn’t this reduce the inequality between men and women, where even today a man gets a longer word (husband) and woman gets a shorter word (wife) in their relationship!
My friends were talking nonsense because they were clearly not in their senses (Friday night get-together and multiple rounds of drinks can do that to you), so I decided to compare the two words, wife and husband, using my own intelligence to check whether either or both of them deserve to be replaced with their informal word.

Wife is such a short cute word, and it rhymes with life.
You can say such nice things about your wife:
“She is my wife, she is my life.”
“She is the only wife in my life.”
“I love watching her cut vegetables with a knife.”
and she will love you even more!

Instead of keeping this wonderful word “wife” as is, people ruin it by adding a ‘y’ to it — ‘y’ do they do that!
My conclusion: We don’t need “wifey”.

But women (as it has always been the case in a patriarchal society) have been given such a dull word to use: “husband”. It rhymes with words like, “repent”, “pretend”, “extend” etc. Try making some sentences about your husband with these wonderful rhyming words.

Initially I wasn’t in favor of using ‘hubby’ as a replacement for ‘husband’ because I have had trouble with it. When I had heard the word for the first time, I had thought the woman was referring to Hubble telescope.
But I do understand that the word “husband” needs a replacement. Husband is such a dry and boring word, that some guys are scared of getting married, but their reluctance reduces to a large extent when they hear their friend’s wives calling them ‘hubby’.
‘Hubby’ is a nice cute lovable word. It rhymes with chubby, that perhaps every man becomes after marriage — chubby hubby.

When I put forward the details of my comparison with my friends (this time we met on a Wednesday afternoon for lunch and they were all in their senses), they were silent.
Someone finally spoke up, “Hey I think we all need a vacation, yeah?”
Everybody happily nodded in agreement and moved on to a different, perhaps more useful topic of conversation.

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