You’re an animal!
Human beings are animals, but we usually don’t like to think of ourselves as animals, at least in “civilized” societies, i.e. those who build cities. In English, as in many other (but not all?) languages, you can insult a person by calling them an animal name, putting them in a position inferior to human. A bitch is any female dog, but comes to mean a vicious female human. A cow is any female bovine, but comes to mean an ugly and unpleasant female human. A chick is a baby bird, but comes to be a dismissive term for any young woman. You can see a pattern that develops in a patriarchal society, too, can’t you? More degrading names for women than for men in English. There used to be wolf, meaning an older lonely man who preyed on young women, but that’s somehow been replaced by cougar, once again putting the focus on putting down women.
Are there any positive animal terms for people in English? How about bears? I like that it’s a name they give themselves as a subset of the gay community and not a pejorative term. But I can’t think of others at the moment—you can email me and suggest some! … And if you’re thinking about endearments, I’m just getting there.
Possum, kitten, pudding, sweetie, baby, and so on, they’re positive, right? Well, sort of. They’re not pejoratives, and they’re not all animal words, and they’re generally said in love, but in a way they’re also dismissive. An endearment word is usually a little thing, a sweet thing, a weak thing, a feminine or feminized thing. When people call their partners or children “sweetie,” they’re saying you belong to me and I love you, but you’re less than I am, weaker than I am, more female than I am. We don’t encourage our children to call adults by diminutive and dismissive names. It’s a power relationship thing.
Now let’s talk about the word “kid” (which is where I’ve been heading for several paragraphs, frankly, and a peeve of mine). A kid is a baby goat. Contemporary English-speaking cultures have largely lost sight of this fact, as we have for the word “bitch.” If you hear someone say “I’m getting a new bitch in from Germany,” you’ll probably do a double take and then realize they’re a dog breeder. Some people feel awkward calling a female dog a bitch, because they don’t want to seem as if they’re insulting the dog! But I think there are many English speakers who don’t even realize that “kid” means baby goat, and might assume that someone calling their young goat a kid is for some reason humanizing it. I know I’ve had students who think that the expression “to handle someone with kid gloves” means to treat them gently, as if they were a child, but it literally means made of the skin of baby goats. Kid gloves were expensive but very thin and supple, and you could handle small objects with great dexterity and care while wearing them.
Imagine using the word “lamb” instead, please. If you found yourself saying “hey, you lambs come over here!” or “do you have any lambs?” you’d likely think it sounded odd and dismissive, yes? But we’re ok with calling young people baby goats. Calling someone a kid used to be a pejorative, in fact, meaning either an obstreperous or troublesome young person—think of Wild West gunmen and rustlers with names like “the Waco Kid”—or someone behaving inappropriately playful—think of “stop kidding around” or “kid stuff.” Now it has become a neutral and totally accepted word to refer to any young human.
But should it? If you know the origin of a word is insulting, you generally try to stop using it, right? We’ve tried to cut a lot of racist terms out of our vocabulary in English, and not say “what a gyp!” or talk about someone as an “Indian giver.” Admittedly, this is a work in progress, as you’ll still hear lots of people say “long time no see,” which is from the Tonto-style speech of stereotyped Native Americans, or “no can do,” which imitates Chinese pidgin and likewise makes fun of people for whom English is not their first language. (Now I hope you’ll think about that when you find yourself saying those two phrases.) Are my people ready to start taking ageist terms out of their language? Probably not. As a society, settler Canada isn’t embarrassed by treating the very young (or the very old) dismissively or demeaningly. We’re happy doing it. I think we need to rethink that. Children and teens are people: young people, but not animals in the sense of being less than human.