I would bring it to his attention gently. Hopefully he will start calling his new wife by her real name.
I have 5 kids and always get the boys mixed up. It is frustrating to me cause my mom only has two girls and always gets us mixed up. Actaully she only gets ME mixed up and calls me by her favorite daughter’s name. Ooooh that makes me mad. Don’t get me started!
I’m so used to shouting “Sparky!!” when Sparky is doing something bad, that sometimes when I need to yell at Dominic quickly (Put down that mug of molten lava right now!) it comes out “Sparky!!!”
I think when you’re in the middle of verbal sentence construction, your brain operates on the principal of Your Name Here (or Fill In the Blank).
“Hey, <Young Female Relation>, get out of there!”
or
“I’m going to dinner with <Significant Other> tonight.”
or
“Come here, <Pet>!”
Where < > indicates a person’s relationship to you, rather than the person (or animal) themselves. And your brain, when tired or in a hurry, just drops in any name that matches that description. Sometimes < > simply indicates anyone for whom you feel love, sometimes with gender associated, sometimes not. My dad would often yell at my brother to get out of the garbage, when of course he was yelling at the dog. Amused me no end, but if I was my brother, I’d be pretty insulted.
I’m only 27, and I’ve started doing that to my nieces and nephews. “Hi, Aubrey-I-mean-Tenley!” “Great drawing, Emily-I-mean-Zach!”
My mum is on holidays and rang me last week…even though I am app. 3000 km away, and her husband, Col, was standing right beside her as she called, she STILL managed to say, “Hi Colin” to ME.
And I do the roll-call routine with the kids as well…when you are irate, the last thing you want to do is stop and think about who you are chewing-out.
Once during an intimate moment I called my girlfriend “Leslie.” This was not her name. Strangely, though, I had never known a Leslie in my entire life (though I know a couple of them now). I have no idea why the name Leslie popped into my mind at that moment.
Fortunately, she had a good sense of humor about it and didn’t take it to mean more than it did, which was Zero.