[[quoteright:350:[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bertha_%28howitzer%29 http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/big-bertha350_1102.jpg]]]]
[[caption-width-right:350:"Big Bertha" in action.]]

Military people, [[TruthInTelevision 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 FluffyTheTerrible and {{Fluffy Tamer}}s do for the animal kingdom, with possibly a little bit of overlap with ICallItVera.

----
!!Examples:
[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder: Anime ]]

* L'Arc-en-ciel is French for Rainbow. It is also the name of the Asura's WaveMotionGun in the MagicalGirlLyricalNanohaAs.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Film ]]

* ''Film/MenInBlack'''s Noisy Cricket, which doesn't look very nasty until it's fired.
* ''Film/SherlockHolmesAGameOfShadows'': 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.
* ''Film/{{Hellboy}}'' and [[{{BFG}} Big Baby.]]
* In ''OpenSeason'', [=McSqueezy=] blows up a hunter's truck with a bomb improvised from a propane tank. He calls it Mr. Happy.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Literature ]]

* ''EndersGame'': 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.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Live Action TV ]]

* StephenColbert has his handgun, which he calls "Sweetness".

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Video Games ]]

* The "Broken Butterfly" magnum and "Matilda" automatic handgun in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil4.'
* ''DevilMayCry 3'''s "Kalina Ann" rocket launcher, used by Lady. She specifically named it after her mother, who was [[spoiler:killed by her father Arkham for a demonic ritual of some sort]].
* The "Tiny Bee" pistols used by Gunners in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX2.''
* From ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'', Heavy's Sasha and Natascha, which are two mini-guns. Though it's averted with his other big guns: the [[TheAmericanCivilWar Brass Beast]], the [[VideoGame/PokerNightAtTheInventory Iron Curtain]], and the [[DamnItFeelsGoodToBeAGangster Tomislav]].

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Real Life ]]

* The TropeNamer is, of course, the "Bouncing Betty". On the off chance there's actually someone here who doesn't know what a Bouncing Betty is, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-mine this article]] at TheOtherWiki 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.
** Even leaving aside the character, bamse was and still is a cutesy adjective (for large).
* 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 [[UpToEleven 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 [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummel_(artillery) 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, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_boy Little Boy]] and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man Fat Man]], the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bomb atomic bombs]] dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. The very first bomb, tested at Alamogordo, was simply called "The Gadget".
** The RAF dropped 4000lb "Cookies" on German targets throughout the war.
* Several variants of Russian rocket artillery was named Katyusha, which is a cutesy nickname for "Catherine" and a [[NewerThanTheyThink 1938 song]] about a young woman waiting for her lover to return. The Germans referred to it as "Stalin's Organ" – [[AccidentalInnuendo no, not]] [[FreudWasRight that one]] – from the sound the rockets made and the way the rockets were mounted in a mounted in a single row of tubes, resembling a pipe organ.
** This has resulted in quite a few jokes about Katyusha walking out onto the shore (from the song)... to unleash a barrage of rocket death on the enemy.
* There was an early-1960s era Soviet antiarmor guided missile with the NATO ReportingName of AT-1 "Swatter," but which Russian troops nicknamed the "Shmel," or "Bumblebee."
** "Shmel" is [[http://world.guns.ru/grenade/gl46-e.htm 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.
** "[[http://world.guns.ru/grenade/gl36-e.htm Canary]]" is a flash- and noiseless underbarrel grenade launcher.
* 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 [[TheCrusades siege of Acre]], King Phillip II of France famously nicknamed one of his two trebuchets "Bad Neighbor". (The other one was "[[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast 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 ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresII''.
* The American CivilWar 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 "[[Literature/{{Discworld}} Dwarf Bread]]".
*** Or ''[[LordOfTheRings 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".
** The British equivalent was called the "Pom-pom", after the noise it made when fired, with four or eight barrels to a turret.
* There is a very large medieval bombard known as Mons Meg which is kept at Edinburgh Castle. Mons refers to the location of one of the early testing sites; TheOtherWiki is not entirely sure where the name Meg came from.
* Russian 18th-century howitzers were called "Unicorns".
* The suitcase that U.S. Presidents have near them at all times containing the nuclear launch codes is creepily but hilariously nicknamed "the football," and the card holding the code to open the football is called "the biscuit." (The former nickname seems to have confused the Brits who created ''ComicBook/{{Watchmen}}'', as in one scene the President is shown carrying a suitcase that is ''literally shaped like a football''.)
----