Freedom's just a suffix for nothing left to lose
BY NAOMI LAKRITZ, CALGARY HERALD JULY 2, 2010 COMMENTS (2)
Open your dictionary and get out your felt-tip pen. There's a new word that needs to be expunged from the English language, a new page in the lexicon that must be marked up by political correctness.
The word to be given the boot is "childless." You see, suddenly, "childless" has become some sort of derogatory term for women who, well, do not have children.
This all came to light with the issuance of a report by the Pew Research Center, on the percentage of American women who are having babies -- or not having them. Danielle Stern, a professor at Virginia's Christopher Newport University, wasn't happy with the word "childless" popping up so often in the report. "'Childless' has such a depressing connotation," she said.
It does? So now we have to chop suffixes from words because they mean that someone is without something, and that's offensive?
"Some women and couples are . . . choosing to be 'child-free'," she added. Hmm. Is child-free something like Alberta being rat-free? Rid of pests of the two-or four-legged kind?
I guess that means we must now give a voice to the voice-free, refer to a double amputee as being leg-free, use cord-free devices, commit sense-free acts, sign up for wire-free Internet, chastise an individual who has committed a rash act as carefree, and characterize someone who is weak and ineffectual as feckfree. Free of all feck -- what an enviable state. And does anybody recall Ichabod Crane from that classic tale, The Head-free Horseman?
But wait. Pamela Tsigdinos, author of a book on childfree-ness, doesn't like people making so free with the suffix -free. She thinks it applies more to those who have decided not to have kids, rather than to those who can't have them. Tsigdinos doesn't like it that people are labelled based on the presence or absence of children in their lives, so if such a label absolutely must be used, she prefers "non-mom."
Here we go again, running scared of our own language. I meant to say "mother tongue," but the word "mother" may be taboo tomorrow. Who knows what linguistic landmine could be planted by then? And "mother" might hurt the feelings of those who aren't mothers because it calls their attention to the fact that they are sans enfants. (Is "sans" still OK to use?) To avoid that dire scenario which fairly oozes offence, we need to pretend there is really no such thing as a mother. In which case, we'd then have to pretend there are no such things as children, since you can't have children without mothers. I have an idea! Let's pretend there is no such thing as people -- if we don't acknowledge that we exist, we can't be offended by the various circumstances of our lives and the labels used to describe them.
If there's anything to be thankful for, it's that we've moved on from the good old days when "challenged" was used as a suffix. If we hadn't moved on, we'd be in the linguistically awkward situation of having to refer to women without children as child-challenged. But by the same token, if some-one's dad has died, is he or she father-free?
Shall we refer to Canada as our non-mom land? The possibilities are endless -- I mean, end-free.
Shades of Janis Joplin. Freedom's just another suffix for nothin' left to lose.
Stern trots out the tired old notion that these usages need to be highlighted "so that we can move toward more inclusive language." I fail to see why everything must be inclusive all the time, or why it's assumed that someone will emotionally wither if she is not included in some category that others are in. That smacks of the mentality of junior high cliques. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people simply get on with their lives without shrivelling up when plain English is used to denote the state of having a child or not having a child.
The hairsplitting that we are doing to the language because of some imagined fear that somebody, somewhere, will be offended by use of correct terminology, is just ridiculous. Has anyone complained besides academics and authors who appear to have way too much time on their hands? No -- and the evidence is in the Pew Research Center report which uses the word "childless" frequently throughout.
The suffix -less simply means "without" or "not having." Certainly, infertility is an emotionally painful situation. However, it is not an insult, nor is it offensive, to say that somebody does not have something. We are not required to engage in semantic sleight-of-hand to pretend that such a fact is really not true, or with Orwellian echoes, that less actually means more. It's long past time for a return to unabashedly straightforward, full-bodied English usage, and an end to this brainless -- oops, brain-free -- manipulation of our non-mom tongue.
nlakritz@theherald.canwest.com
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