It's not a bump, it's a pregnancy

Monday January 23, 2006 @ 03:33 PM (UTC)

I get annoyed at the strangest things, but I maintain that, as a linguaphile and degreed English nitpicker, I have every right to care minutely about language.

If you shop for groceries, you cannot help but know that everybody in Hollywood is pregnant, just delivered, or is thinking about getting pregnant. Everyone. I fully expect to hear next that Colin Ferrell passed out one night and woke up pregnant the next morning. Everyone’s pregnant. However, somewhere around Jennifer Garner’s pregnancy, women stopped ‘showing’ and ‘looking very pregnant’, and their enlarged abdomens ceased being ‘bellies’. They are, apparently, ‘bumps’.

Whose idea was this, and why is it now the premier pregnancy nomenclature? Does anyone else find it vaguely repellant that Star X is ‘seen in public sporting a bump’ in the same way that she might sport a Gucci handbag? Even apart from the clear implication that a pregnancy is just the hottest Hollywood accessory trend, the word is not attractive. Bumps make me think of traffic calming measures, poorly surfaced roads, and being jostled in line. They don’t make me think of new life in any way, shape and or form.

Obviously, I am only the Word Police in my own mind, but this lazy, objectifying and ugly choice of words annoys me constantly, and I know I am not the only one. You are free to think I’m crazy, but as I am the girl who dreamt last night that David Boreanaz was teaching her ballroom dancing but refused to tell her the names of the steps, I think that’s a foregone conclusion.

Comments

It’s almost as bad as referring to children as “crotch droppings.

Almost.

Dear god. Someone says that?

Well, I suppose someone says just about everything. But at least at my grocery store, I don’t have to see that plastered across every gossip rag and scandal sheet, so it’s rawther a different matter.

I dislike Livejournal, so I don’t have an account, so, winter_in_asia, I happened across a post of yours about a speech by Bush, and I wanted to post this comment:


Title: Dude.

Body:
“Brevity is the soul of wit” is SHAKESPEARE. Even Cher from Clueless knows who said that; it’s Polonius. :P

-Felicity

P.S. Your Livejournal is seriously weird for those of us who neither read Japanese nor use Livejournal enough to know instinctively what the Japanese says!

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