Apples and eyes.

There are some weird ways to express affection. Of course there are all the silly pet names we give each other, like punkin and babycakes and honeybunch and, as one girlfriend liked to call me, turkey (it didn't last long). 

More archaic terms might include the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas, Jazz Age phrases that seem to have, like jazz itself. just come to be out of a love for rhythm and rhyme over sense. Mental Floss couldn't find any known logic to them, anyway. P.G. Wodehouse preferred the lodestar of my existence and variations, which at least makes sense -- a lodestar being a star by which one navigates. Webster notes that the literal sense of a lodestar as a guide to a happy destination didn't outlast the 17th century, but the figurative sense lives on. 

The one I always disliked was the apple of my eye. The idiom comes from the Bible, where it appears in several places. By its use, the apple is a metaphor for the pupil, in that it is something in the center of the eye, and thus the beloved is always in the center of one's vision. 

He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.

(Deuteronomy 32:10)

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings.

(Psalm 17:8)

There's something weird going on here regarding the word pupil. Apparently there was no English word for the little black spot in the center of the iris until the 15th century, can you believe it? And why is the word for student the same as the word for the aperture of the eyeball? Coincidence? Nope! Here's the story: 

If you look into another person's eye, you can see a small reflection of yourself. That small image made the ancient Romans think of a doll. Thus, they called the part of the eye in which it appears the pupilla. This word literally meant "little doll." The English word for that part of the eye, pupil, can be traced to the Latin pupilla. Pupilla also had another meaning. A little girl who was an orphan and was in the care of a guardian was called a pupilla. A little boy in the same situation was called a pupillus. From these two Latin words we get the other English pupil, meaning "a young student in the care of a tutor or in school."

It's appropriate in an upside-down way to think of the image of yourself as a little doll in someone's eye, because the image does register on the retina -- upside down, along with everything around you. 

I just don't dig eyeball-related metaphors, I guess. When I was a kid Keep your eyes peeled grossed me out; I was thinking not of peeling back the eyelid, but of Mom's apple-peeler going to work on the eyeballs. Yeesh! 

So I'll just stick with my favorite terms of endearment and leave the biblical apples of eyes alone. Terms like Hey you and Bozo and What's your name again? They always work.