cptsdcarlosdevil:

there are no good choices

if no one comes up with something better I’m going with “zaza”, on the grounds that all nonbinary words include z’s or x’s

 

towardsagentlerworld:

Can they just call you Ozy?

(I may teach my child to call me by my first name, because (1) that’s what everyone else calls me, and (2) I’m going to call my child by their first name, so it’s only fair that they get to do the same for me)

(In India, there are specific titles for “older brother” and “older sister”, such that younger siblings typically don’t address their elder siblings by name. Elder siblings, however, do address their younger siblings by name. It eventually started to feel to me like the main purpose of these words was to enforce age-hierarchical relationships, and so I was happy that English doesn’t do that. But American English still has the norm of not calling your parents by their first name, and while I don’t think most parents have the intention of using this to enforce a hierarchical dynamic, I wonder if it has the same effect.)

(This is a really tentative hypothesis, and even if it’s true, I imagine the effect would be really small. And so I don’t think that teaching your kids to call you “Mom” or “Dad” [or “Zaza”] is wrong. But I personally don’t see a good reason for the terms “Mom” or “Dad” to exist, and I definitely want my child to know that they can address me by name if they’d like.)

 

coffeespoonsposts:

My stepmother specifically said that she wanted her son (my half brother) to call her ‘mum’ to enforce a hierarchical relationship. She’s generally very liberal.

 

towardsagentlerworld:

huh, okay, datapoint.

 

warpedellipsis:

When parents get pissy that their child called them by their first name, you know it’s a dominance thing. Most parents get pissy about it. It’s not just convention. I’ve never met any that haven’t. 

 

sinesalvatorem:

I once called my mother by her first name and she looked at me like I’d started speaking a foreign language. She didn’t, like, say it was wrong, or something, but she did seem to think it was hella weird.

And, like, it felt weird in my mouth, and no other kids did that, so I immediately switched back to “mummy”. It feels more natural.

But, now that you mention it, I think most parents do get upset about it. Yikes, even more hidden dominance shit.

OTOH, not having any special way of referring to one’s parents (or *children or other relatives) feels even weirder to me. Ideally, every relationship relative to the speaker should have a lexical title, for ease of sorting people. Maybe I could go by “Mother Alison”, the way nuns do?

*The child title in my culture is “Likl [name]”, from English “little”. I also like how our community has settled on “Baby” for “Baby Andromeda” and “Baby Merlin”, though that probably won’t last throughout childhood.

This reminds me that, earlier today, my cousin asked me if he could call me ‘Aunty Alison’, since that’s the adult female familiar title. I am So Touched.

 

warpedellipsis:

All other relatives, at least American-style, do go by title/relationship-name though? Like, Grandma Jane, Uncle Phil. Parents are the only ones that don’t, I think. Cousins don’t because that’s an equal relationship, not a powered one. 

I wonder how much of the resistance to alternate family structures, like multiple and blood-unrelated parents, is because of this. If you don’t have ownership of the kid, then you have no title, and if you don’t have a title, a separate title, then you have no way to know who the kid is referring to. And no way for other adults to refer to you. It’s all very set in 2-opposite gender parents for each kid, zero flexibility. If there were other names or flexibility, there wouldn’t be so much reason to resist. 

What’s the neutral name for a parent, that isn’t parent? It just sounds way too formal to go “Parent Haley”. Maybe that would work for places like schools to address the family, and I think that’s how they’ve handled same-sex relationships, but I don’t think a kid could do that. Are there other languages or cultures that have some kind of Name-(affectionate additive) or Title type thing that would fit this? Make one up?

 

sinesalvatorem:

My maternal grandmother is “Granny”, my paternal grandmother is “Grandma”, my maternal grandfather is “Granddad”, and my paternal grandfather is “Grandpa”.

I was 10 by the time I learned it was possible to use language such that The Four Grandparents might be ambiguous.

Likewise, if I had two parents of each gender, they’d be “mummy”, “mama”, “daddy”, and “papa”. Do other varieties of English not have two kid words for each parent-gender? This certainly wouldn’t be a problem for someone who grew up with my variety.

Although, really, now that I’m aware of the potential creepy ownership stuff, I think I’ll just have [title] + [name] for all relatives; people of equal or lower social status included.

I need to learn, and raise my kids with, a language that handles all this stuff better. Language nerds!, any suggestions?

I, too, distinguish the four grandparents by using different variants of “grandma” and “grandpa” rather than by name. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent mapping among families that do this, though: mine are “Gramma” for maternal grandmother, “Grampa” for maternal grandfather, “Granny” for paternal grandmother, and “Grampy” for paternal grandfather (though by the time I was old enough to talk Grampy was dead, so that term never got a whole lot of use). The lack of consistency always annoyed me a bit, that if I were speaking to someone outside my family, I couldn’t just say “Gramma” to communicate that I was talking about my maternal grandmother.

(Region notes: my grandparents lived in Massachusetts, part of New England. My parents moved to New Jersey after marrying, which is too far south for New England but still part of the broader Northeast.)

“Mama” and “Papa” sound slightly foreign or old-fashioned (I think I’ve only encountered them in historical novels, people from the South, and possibly-Brits-but-those-might-have-also-been-historical, never from speakers of my own dialect), but not so weird that they wouldn’t suffice if “Mom” and “Dad” were taken.

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Another difference I’ve seen is in how a child refers to parents of other children. Apparently “Mr/Mrs X” is very common, and in many places the only polite form of address. I never did that: if I knew the parent through the child, I called them “[Child’s] mom/dad”, and if I knew the parent directly, I called them by their first name.

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