To Mr. Cecil Adams,
Here is my contribution to the good work that you are doing to eradicate the dearth of knowledge that we are suffering from.
…none is as good for a human baby as its mother’s milk.
…the pronoun for a human form is either he or she(his or her). The pronoun for an anim is “it”.
If you are human, you must speak our language.
…none is as good for a human baby as his/her mother’s milk is.
…postneonatal death
…post natal death
…some deaths have been reported.
…death is an uncountable noun. It is similar to the uncountable noun awake.
…if babies die, you must state that babies have died.
…some babies have died.
…if you suckle your kid in public.
…a kid is a baby goat, an anim.
We do lots of threads on grammar, style, and usage on the Dope. You should read them to see what depth of nuance we reach.
Pontificating is what we do. Undermining each others’ assertations is what we like best.
The one thing that the knowledgeable do agree on is that there are no enforceable “rules” even for formal writing. A wide range of usage and meaning are allowed. That’s doubly true for the kind of informal or colloquial writing that is the norm here.
So when you say a kid is restricted in meaning to a baby goat, you’re denying a usage that was “recorded as slang 1590s, [and] established in informal usage by 1840s.”
English has no singular form of a genderless pronoun other than it. Formal usage would normally require his or her to reference baby but the use of it in this and similar cases also goes back 500 years and can be found in major writers thoughout that time.
Death as a specific and therefore countable instance of the cessation of life is again equally old.
Post-neonatal death is a technical term and is widely used.
The use of anim for animal is purely mysterious, though. I can’t find any backing for such a usage or spelling.
Methinks your first language is not English and you were put through a course in which some teacher taught you “rules.” This was done solely to make life easier for the teacher. They don’t work outside your classroom.
That doesn’t mean you couldn’t impose those standards on yourself for use in your own writing and be correct. You can. Except for anim.
I don’t know where you got this rule from. In English, it’s perfectly usual to refer to a baby or young child as “it” if you don’t know its gender.
And English is not the only language spoken by humans.
You’re missing the point here: “postneonatal death” is death that occurs after the neonatal period, i.e., after the first few weeks of life. “Postnatal death” is almost a tautology – death generally happens after birth – though I suppose it excludes death inside the womb, which results in a stillborn child.
The text ‘nessecity’ is encapsulated within several entities that are not being scanned by my Internet Explorer’s ‘Find’ function. Is this the browser you are using? I’d have to do more research to get you a more specific answer, but there is Javascript code and possibly Ajax involved that could easily have that text stored internally outside of the ‘Find’ function’s scope (generic scope, not the JS term necessarily). If you right click and select ‘View Source’ you can find it easily in the page source. I find it interesting because I haven’t encountered this specific circumstance in the short time I’ve been playing with these new-fangled electronic abaci.
Thank you for the info. I’m working with a crippled OS while simmering in anger over a beaurocratic (insert expletive filled flaming diatribe), so I have had to uninstall most software. Sadly, someone someday may rely on me to understand this useless bit of technical trivia. (Don’t worry I’m not suffering from ‘malware’ unless you count MS products, I’ve evolved heavy ‘Net Protection’).
…if you suckle your kid in public.
…a kid is a baby goat, an anim.
[QUOTE]
I just checked my old American Heritage dictionary. It’s first definition is a ‘kid’ as a young child. Baby goat was the third definition.
English is an ever changing language and its usage is quite flexible. The whole idea of a strict English rules of grammar was a late 19th century invention. This is where we came up with such great rules as “Never split an infinitive”, "Don’t begin a sentence with ‘Because’’, and “Never end a sentence with a preposition”:
*Person #1: You’re from Chicago? That’s where I’m from!
Person #2: Never end a sentence with a preposition!
Person #1: Okay, “That’s where I’m from, stupid!”*
I went through a few style manuals, and none are clear whether or not you can use “its” when referring to infants, but most state that unless their is a common view of an object having a particular gender, its is generally recognized as being acceptable. For example:
They are responsible for placing the corpse in its grave.
Although corpses have a definite gender, you normally don’t view corpse as having a specific sex. (However, if you do think of sex when thinking about corpses, you probably need therapy.)
I would assume that its should be acceptable for infants too. When you picture a generic infant, you don’t necessarily associate it with a particular sex. This is different than a child or an adult which you cannot picture unless you think of them having a particular sex. (i.e. I can picture a child as a boy or as a girl, but I can’t picture a generic child without that child being either a boy or a girl).