Wednesday December 12, 2007
Sprogs in a poop factory
By GRANT BARRETT
A COMPLAINT that comes across my desk with fair regularity is that kid should never be used to mean child. The argument is that a kid is a young goat, not a child.
Well, yes, of course a kid is a young goat. But English is full of words with more than one meaning; it’s full of synonyms for the same meaning, and it has different registers of speaking. Different registers call for different words. If synonyms didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.
Child is the right word to use for a young human in formal situations such as in court proceedings, hospital records, or when meeting a wealthy grand-uncle for the first time.
Kid is appropriate when speaking to your close family or to the kids themselves. Kid works in just about any situation where you don’t need to address people as “Sir”, “Madam” or “Your Honour”.
I can’t imagine my mother ever shouting anything but “You kids stop that!” at me and my four siblings when we were up to no good.
Synonyms for child are plentiful, most of them at an even lower speech register than kid. Many are teasing or just plain derogatory, so I should tell you that I relate these as the father of a nine-month-old, whom I call, variously, Boy, Sweet Boy, Fatty Man, Shouty Man, and Mr Manses (unnecessary plurals being a feature of babytalk in our home – manses also has the babytalk bonus of being an ungrammatical plural).
Kiddie is a variant of kid that emphasises the unimportance or youngness of children even further. A 12-year-old is more likely to be called kid and a three-year-old is more likely to be called kiddie. You can find it used in compound words such as kiddie pool, a shallow swimming place for children who need constant supervision.
Most kid synonyms have to do with child-like characteristics. Ankle-biter, for example, is a three-for-one, indicating at once the tendency of children to chew on things, to crawl around on the floor, and to annoy people who are upright.
Ankle-biter is a successful enough slang word that it can now be applied to an adult to mean any person who is unimportant and irritating.
Similarly, the very common slang word rugrat has notions of biting, climbing, and overall undesirability. A rat on the rug, using its teeth as rats tend to do.
Shortly after children begin crawling, they begin climbing, and they get a whole raft of new names. Curtain-climber, curtain-crawler, and drape ape are three. Drap ape, like its synonyms house ape and yard ape, is a word to avoid in situations where the child is dark-skinned. You might be accused of being racist or bigoted.
Probably the most insulting words are those used by the so-called child-free movement. These are folks who advocate having no children for a variety of reasons. Either they believe in population control, or they do not believe children should suffer in a cruel world, or they hold the opinion just to rile those who believe having children is a God-given duty.
Apparently inspired by the description of children as the fruit of one’s loins, child-free proponents give us the terms crotchfruit and crotch dumpling.
Crotch is the fork in the body where the legs meet the torso. It’s often used vulgarly because so many taboo bodily functions are centred there. While fruit and dumplings are normally edible, to suggest they originate in the crotch is also to suggest they are something unwholesome passed of as wholesome.
The child-free proponents push language even further and seem to say, “Why wait until the child is born to point out its food-filching ways?” So, they have a term, placenta-moocher, which, while not common, causes outrage when it’s used.
Placenta is the organ by which a pregnant mother transmits food to her foetus. To mooch is to ask for something, such as food or money, in a wheedling, persistent way.
In Britain, sprog is a common name for child. The moniker seems to have originated in the Navy to indicate a new sailor, though it might be related to an older term sprag, a young salmon or cod.
Sprog begets other forms, namely to sprog, meaning to have offspring, and sproglodyte, a blend of sprog and troglodyte, which originally meant “a cave-dweller” but is now popularly used to mean someone who is ignorant and doesn’t mind being so.
There’s also goldensprog, which adds in the idea of a golden child, one that is inappropriately sainted, pampered, and believe to do no wrong.
There are many dozen more such terms, but I’ll leave you with a favourite: poop factory. That is to say, the primary product of babies is poop (slang for faeces) and lots of it. Day in and day out, they produce it with efficiency.
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