asked a question<\/a> on the kiplinger.com forum about sending their “grandkids” to college, the response from the community member included the line: “Why do you want to send your goats to college? Goats have kids, people have children.”<\/p>\nAs is usual with the pompous language police, that response isn’t merely pretentious and rude, but it’s ridiculous as well. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, people have been using “kid” for “human child” since at least 1599. That’s over 400 years, which gives it a pretty good pedigree.<\/p>\n
This isn’t a case of someone misusing a word. It’s a case of someone using an extremely common and broadly understood (though informal) word that the other person just doesn’t care for. It kind of makes me happy to think of that guy walking around getting annoyed every time someone says “kid”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While titling my last post, I remembered a debate that seems to be important to some people about the word “kid.” Some people don’t like referring to human children as “kids.” They want “kid” only to refer to a goat (or possibly deer or antelope). For example, when someone asked a question on the kiplinger.com […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-languagelit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/p>\n