Nope, still hard. Especially because you have case-declination *and* a partially-fixed word order, which is just overkill.

What you are overlooking is that the Chris Claremont X-Men, which featured an international team, had a bunch of characters who were always peppering their conversation with the same three or four foreign words. Because they were foreign, y'know. It's a convention and it will probably live on forever.

In this particular case, I might defend it by saying that I doubt that Erik has been much in the habit of using endearments in *any* language he learned after the age of eleven, and endearments really are an emotional category of language all their own, so I could see that kind of lapse back in an intimate moment. I mean, it's one thing to *know* that "sweetheart" or "darling" are fair English translations of Schatz, it's quite another to feel that they have the same emotional force.