Aug 16 2008
Stylized Pronouns: The Proper Use of ‘Boy’ And ‘Baby’
When Aiden was born, I always called him “the boy”. It was “Where’s the boy?” or “I’ll change the boy.“ People would sometimes criticize me because I didn’t say “my son” or “our son”, but it just came out as “the boy” when I referred to him. Think of it as a “stylized pronoun”, since it’s used to refer to him, not something that we call him directly. “Hey, boy!” sounds too much like Homer Simpson.
Enter Gavin. It started early, with me calling Gavin “the boy” on day one (three weeks ago, for those keeping count). I knew that this would get confusing very quickly, since we now had two boys. One might say that I shouldn’t have started calling Aiden “the boy” to begin with, but Chrissy calls him that as well, so it’s not just me. The obvious step would be to call Gavin some else, like “the baby”. And that sounded right.
So now I have two sons, one that we call “the boy” and one that we call “the baby”. It’s strange that we never called Aiden that when he was an infant, but then we didn’t already have a boy that we needed to differentiate from. I find myself slipping often, but I’m getting better about referring to Gavin as “the baby”. And Aiden knows Gavin as “the baby” as well. If you ask him where the baby is, he’ll point him right out.
Our stylized pronouns should not be confused with nicknames. Each of our sons has their own nickname, and it’s not “boy” or “baby”. That would be lame. I often call Aiden “Hot Shot” or “Shotimus Prime”, and that has stuck since he was tiny. Lately, I’ve been calling Gavin “Tiberius” because his middle name is “James” (get it?). We’ll see if that sticks like “Hot Shot” did for Aiden.
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