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The foot-woman connection did not seem very solid to me so I searched the dictionaries at my disposal. In the Dictionary of the Scots Language I found the word “toots,” a word related to a more convincing body part: TOOT, int., v.2 Also tout; toots, touts; tets, tits, t(y)uts and reduplic. forms toot(s)-toot(s), tuts-tuts.
The early instance of tootsy-pootsies that Callithumpian notes in a comment beneath the posted question is evidently from "The Physiology of London Evening Parties," part IV, in Punch, or the London Charivari (January [?] 1842), subsequently included (with minor revisions) in volume 2 of Albert Smith, The Wassail-bowl: A Comic Christmas Sketch-book (1844):
A shortened form of the hypocoristic dim. suffix -sy suffix, added to the same classes of words, as Babs, Toots; ducks (see duck n.1 3c), moms. I wasn't familiar with the referenced singular use of moms, but the OED entry for that word provides some examples that are similar to the use of pops: In quot. 1976, addressed ironically to a man.
The toast goes back more than half a century before the scriptwriters of Casablanca used it in 1942.. From Anonymous, A Holiday Skip to the Far West (1884), we have this scene set in the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri:
You got that right, Mr_Spock, except the OP is looking for an idiom, not a neologism. Also, it helps if your neologism is universally understood, which the hanger comment is not, babe. ;-) +1 for the "toots", I like that! –
It seems an open-and-shut case, the correct version for asking the word of something in English is What do you call…? And yet the sheer number of second-language speakers of English who ask daily...
I frequently use girlie or toots with my close female friends. If you don't know the person well enough, this may come off as misogynistic. My friends know me well enough to know I like speaking like a 1930s gangster at times, and find it cute. And, of course as many before me have pointed out: dude has become androgynous.
According to NGram Viewer, this is a new term first gaining some prominence in the late 1980's. It would seem to mean based on what I can find, to reference a male homosexual relationship of some varying level of intimacy.
A comment in “What is a feminine version of guys?” got me wondering: how derogatory is the use of chicks to refer to women (either in general, or to a specific group). To me (I'm a man), it was quite