Cute as a Bouncing Betty



Military people, real or fictional, have a macabre (and often hilarious) tendency to give cutesy nicknames to some truly nasty and often lethal hardware. This trope does for weapons what Fluffy the Terrible and Fluffy Tamers do for the animal kingdom, with possibly a little bit of overlap with I Call It "Vera".

Film

 * Men in Black's Noisy Cricket, which doesn't look very nasty until it's fired.
 * Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: When Moriarty's troops can't hit Holmes, Watson, and Sim with their regular guns and mortars, they pull out the absurdly large cannon named Little Hansel.
 * Hellboy and Big Baby.

Literature

 * Ender's Game: I give you the Molecular Detachment Device, capable quite literally of destroying whole planets. Also known as the Little Doctor or Doctor Device, for M.D. Device.

Live Action TV

 * Stephen Colbert has his handgun, which he calls "Sweetness".

Video Games

 * The "Broken Butterfly" magnum and "Matilda" automatic handgun in ''Resident Evil 4.'
 * Devil May Cry 3's "Kalina Ann" rocket launcher, used by Lady.
 * The "Tiny Bee" pistols used by Gunners in Final Fantasy X-2.
 * From Team Fortress 2, Heavy's Sasha and Natascha, which are two mini-guns. Though it's averted with his other big guns: the Brass Beast, the Iron Curtain, and the Tomislav.

Real Life

 * The Trope Namer is, of course, the "Bouncing Betty". On the off chance there's actually someone here who doesn't know what a Bouncing Betty is, this article at The Other Wiki should bring you up to speed...
 * Swedish servicemen famously call a similar contraption "Lille Skutt" ("little hop") after a cute cartoon rabbit from Bamse...
 * Heck, Bamse itself is an anti-air missile. Considering the very explicit pacifism of both the character and the author of the comic, you can understand why Rune A. was not amused.
 * The Germans had a knack for this in both World Wars. A longer-barreled but smaller-bored (relatively speaking) railway gun on the same type of mounting as the Big Bertha was known as Schlanke Emma ("Slender Emma"). And the most famous (or most bizarre, depending on your point of view) German artillery piece of World War One, the Paris Gun that shelled the French capital from over 70 miles (110 kilometers) range, was according to Ian Hogg nicknamed "Die Parisien" by its crew- which as he points out translates into French as La Parisienne.
 * There's another German gun called Big Bertha, pictured above.
 * Yet another absurdly-huge German gun was called Dora.
 * The 180 ton Panzerkampfwagen VII was known as the "Maus" (Mouse).
 * The WWII-era German self-propelled gun known as the Hummel (bumblebee) looks like this.
 * Two huge German Krupp K5 railroad guns which were used to defend against the Allied landing at Anzio, Italy in 1944 were nicknamed by their crews Leopold and Robert, which are men's names and only slightly cutesy...but the Allied soldiers who were taking fire from the guns called them Anzio Express and Anzio Annie.
 * The current German army has a difficult time finding acceptance with the civilian population, so they avoid overly agressive or martial names for their equipment. Combat vehicles often have names like mongoose, weasel, or dingo, which are all cute animals, but also very vicious predators.
 * Also from World War II, Little Boy and Fat Man, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively.
 * Several variants of Russian rocket artillery was named Katyusha, which is a cutesy nickname for "Catherine" and a 1938 song about a young woman waiting for her lover to return.
 * The Germans referred to it as "Stalin's Organ". No, not that one.
 * There was an early-1960s era Soviet antiarmor guided missile with the NATO Reporting Name of AT-1 "Swatter," but which Russian troops nicknamed the "Shmel," or "Bumblebee."
 * "Shmel" is something else altogether. Namely, a launcher with fuel-air explosive grenade in the main variant. That is, not tank-killing, but creating 3 m radius exploding cloud that takes out everyone in a room regardless of their personal armor and kicks a wall or two out.
 * "Canary" is a flash- and noiseless underbarrel grenade launcher.
 * The Bundeswehr tends to name its vehicles after animals. (They seem to be running out of common ones, though; Hands up if you knew what a Fennek is before you knew of the recon-vehicle.)
 * The habit of naming cannons goes back all the way to the advent of widespread artillery. Since there was no standardization for the bore sizes, the balls and loading and cleaning equipment had to be custom made for each cannon. Naming the cannons made it easier for the less-well-paid members of the cannon crew to fetch the right equipment. Incidentally this troper is part of a group that owns a replica cannon named Paksu Katariina (Fat Catherine).
 * It actually is older than Gunpowder: during the siege of Acre, King Phillip II of France famously nicknamed one of his two trebuchets "Bad Neighbor". (The other one was "God's Own Sling"; the opposing Muslim army had its counterpart, "Bad Kinsman").
 * The two trebuchets even get a cameo in a mission depicting that siege in Age of Empires II.
 * The American Civil War brings us Pumpkin-Slingers (rifles with unusually heavy bullets), Donkey-Kickers (rifles that had a lot of recoil), and wormcastles and tacks (biscuits that are stale to the point of being harder than rocks).
 * Nowadays, we call that "Dwarf Bread".
 * Or cram.
 * One of the anti-aircraft guns used on US naval ships was a 1.1 inch quad gun nicknamed "The Chicago Piano." Prior to that, "Chicago Piano" was a nickname for the Thompson Submachine gun.
 * Or maybe, since the Tommy-gun is also known as "Chicago typewriter", the nickname was chosen to mean "bigger than a Tommy-gun".