The Gestation of Tadpoles; and other such nonsense

I spoke with a coworker this week who listed to me her troubles, including the woe of not being able to drink away said troubles because she's carrying a human, i.e., she is in the family way.

"And actually it's not even a human yet!" she added.

"What is it? A tadpole?" I asked.

She laughed.

It is incongruous. You can "hang out" all weekend (which never involves hanging), "do stuff" to keep busy, and "mess around" (which probably involves watching television), but when you reach certain topics, people adopt Sheldon Cooper's penchant for precision.

So first one bears a zygote, which at some point turned into a fetus, and only the careless or a fundamentalist* would assume to call someone else's child a baby before it's born. It may not be considered a baby yet, based on the parents' inclinations.

This reminds me of one of Dr. Michael Bauman's rants lectures about the importance of language to ideology. If it is wrong to kill humans, and a baby is a tiny human, it would be wrong to kill it at any stage. If it's just a fetus, well, bring on the advanced coat hangers.** If God isn't a man (human), can't we call God a she? If two people love each other and want to live together forever, isn't that a marriage?

If you try to substitute one word for another, you lose the connotations of the original word. Words in themselves are just sounds, and one sound may be just as good as the other. You cannot swap meanings so easily; it is dangerous to try.

~Reese


*The fundamentalists are coming!!! Run away!!!
**Does it bother anyone else that liberals are more offended by the method of using coat hangers in abortions than the actual abortions?