"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
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?
3 comments:
Brilliant, dear. I appreciated your second footnote especially. Did you get very far with your co-worker in the "tadpole" line of reasoning?
~ J
Nope, she just laughed, and then someone brought up a movie where a woman was impregnated by an alien. That was as far as I got.
Hm, not very helpful of the third party... But perhaps you planted the idea of how absurd it is that what is created in the womb can be anything but human.
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