What do you call a baby that isn't born yet when you are speaking about it as a person?
That is, when you are speaking about the baby in a situation that calls for the third-person pronoun he or she or the third-person possessive his or hers if you were speaking about someone already born, what do you say? I've found this somewhat frustrating over the last few months and, since SJC and I are not going to find out the sex of the child, it seems that it is a potential problem for the instant future.
Example 1: SJC and I are looking at a baby development article in a magazine. We see a picture of a fetus at 3 months. Sarah says, "Look at the little arms, [blank] is so cute!
Example 2: We're thinking about decorating our nursery. I say, "And we can put all of [blank] winter clothes on this shelf."
Now if you knew the sex of the child, you'd just say he or she or his or her in the above blanks. Or if you had picked out names, you could just use those. But we don't and we haven't, so we can't.
The apparent available options are, in my opinion, grim:
1) Use "baby" with no modifier. This is the solution of all the pregnancy magazines. Just pretend every fetus is named Baby. At 3 months, baby's little arms will start to develop. Ugh. Baby can now move around and you might feel baby kick. Double ugh. Not only does it sound ridiculous, but it always reminds me of the main character from Dirty Dancing. And I'm not setting my fetus up for a 16 year-old romance with Patrick Swayze.
2) Use "it." This is equally awkward. It's like you're describing a rodent. If you sit still, you will eventually hear it move around.
3) Just go with the feminine gender. This is what we do with lots of other personifications that are androgynous. Boats. Nations. States of the Union. Still, it doesn't fell right. And I'm sure my 7 year old son will be real annoyed if he reads his baby blog and is constantly seeing things like at the first ultrasound, we could hear her heartbeat!
So i dunno. Any suggestions I haven't thought of?
That is, when you are speaking about the baby in a situation that calls for the third-person pronoun he or she or the third-person possessive his or hers if you were speaking about someone already born, what do you say? I've found this somewhat frustrating over the last few months and, since SJC and I are not going to find out the sex of the child, it seems that it is a potential problem for the instant future.
Example 1: SJC and I are looking at a baby development article in a magazine. We see a picture of a fetus at 3 months. Sarah says, "Look at the little arms, [blank] is so cute!
Example 2: We're thinking about decorating our nursery. I say, "And we can put all of [blank] winter clothes on this shelf."
Now if you knew the sex of the child, you'd just say he or she or his or her in the above blanks. Or if you had picked out names, you could just use those. But we don't and we haven't, so we can't.
The apparent available options are, in my opinion, grim:
1) Use "baby" with no modifier. This is the solution of all the pregnancy magazines. Just pretend every fetus is named Baby. At 3 months, baby's little arms will start to develop. Ugh. Baby can now move around and you might feel baby kick. Double ugh. Not only does it sound ridiculous, but it always reminds me of the main character from Dirty Dancing. And I'm not setting my fetus up for a 16 year-old romance with Patrick Swayze.
2) Use "it." This is equally awkward. It's like you're describing a rodent. If you sit still, you will eventually hear it move around.
3) Just go with the feminine gender. This is what we do with lots of other personifications that are androgynous. Boats. Nations. States of the Union. Still, it doesn't fell right. And I'm sure my 7 year old son will be real annoyed if he reads his baby blog and is constantly seeing things like at the first ultrasound, we could hear her heartbeat!
So i dunno. Any suggestions I haven't thought of?
I think you should just refer to it/him/her/baby using the word their. "Wouldn't their winter clothes fit perfectly here" or "Their feet keep kicking me in the ribs." I know it is incorrect grammar seeing as you aren't having multiples, but I think it would work. However, if you really want to you could also just call it Becky. :)
ReplyDeleteI cannot speak for many of the world's languages, but isn't the neuter form en francais (and I think the other Latin tongues) revert to the masculine form?
ReplyDeleteTherefore, call it he, his, etc.
Or just Dan.
(I've done some quick checking in the original "Pope's English", where the neuter-singular endings in the 2nd declension is 'um.' So we've been right the whole time. Like, as in the dialogue:
Sarah: What do we call the unborn baby?
Matt: Um...
While I like both Dan and Becky's solutions (i.e., call the baby "Dan" or "Becky" depending, apparently, on whether you agree with Dan's assessment of the second declension of Pope's English), I can offer what my parents always did: They invented an "in utero" name -- a name that they used to refer to the baby before he/she was born, in order to avoid the problems you mentioned.
ReplyDeleteWhile that idea didn't really catch on with Steve and I (we usually said "the baby" as opposed to just "baby" -- a little clunky, perhaps, but we felt it conveyed the proper respect, and were very consistent about it), my Dad did consistently use an in-utero name that he came up with for both Thomas and Gabe, which was Teddy. As in bear. So it was gender-neutral, cuddly, and lovable. When I was working at City Hall, he even used to leave me a post-it on my desk asking "How's Teddy?" (Gabe was actually "Teddy 2.")
Another name he considered before settling on Teddy was "Cubby." As in bear cub. (Do you see a theme? It's because he calls me "Bloozer Bear.") I've also known of people using nicknames like "Sweetpea" (like "pea in the pod"), "Bean" (the "pea" idea again I think), "Bunny" (both cute and furry, and also "bun in the oven"), etc.
Hope that helps!
Re: Kate's suggestion, while my mother was pregnant with Gabs we referred to her as "Thumby." It had some basis of origin in a comment my mother's ob-gyn made about the size of a fetus at the end of the first trimester, although I think we later told Gabie that it was short for Thumbelina. It offered our conversations a fair amount of articulation, although it did little to help solve the nebulous pronoun quandary.
ReplyDeleteI should also warn that a name like Thumby is a bit dangerous as, once used, it's rather catchy. Thumby stuck to Gabie well into her toddler-hood, at which point we moved onto "Goobs" and "Gobbles."