Jabberwocky: Attack of the Crib Lizards
The peculiar language of the childfree.
by Mark Peters
March 15, 2007
breeder
In the gay community, this has been slang for "parent" since at least 1979, and it's no shock that "breeder" is a staple of the childfree, who have nursed and bred many variations such as "breeder brain," "breedermobile" and "breederville," which refer to heads, vehicles and places full of kids. Of course, Babble's "Notes from a Non-Breeder" column is a nod to this usage. A vivid alternative to "breeder brain" is "placenta brain."
moo
A very common childfree term that stands for Mother Obsessed with Offspring or Mother Oblivious to Offspring. The childfree lexicon is much nastier to women than men, and moo has a lot of close relatives such as mombie and womban.
hump dumpling
One of many words for a kid, including anklebiter, bratzilla, nipplecruncher, fartling, shriekling and sperm and egg omelet.
At the risk of offending the childfree, this stuff sounds like something a kid made up. Booger brain, placenta brain, what's the diff? Michael Adams — author of Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon and Slang: The People's Poetry (forthcoming late 2007) — says the childfree lexicon "may begin with mockery, but the mockery isn't very far from what's being mocked." Adams notes the childfree tendency toward rhyme and other language play; he says terms like "baby rabies" and "hump dumpling" — despite their literal meaning — may be "acknowledging the ultimate sovereignty of children and their language."
It sure doesn't get much more Beavis-and-Butthead-esque than "crotchfruit," the most striking and successful childfree term, which the American Dialect Society voted Most Outrageous Word of 2005. (Full disclosure: I was part of this meeting, and I'm childish and Could the childfree be doing the child-laden a favor?
childless, though not childfree). "Crotchfruit" is often used in the expressions "popped a crotchfruit" or "dropped some crotchfruit," and there are many one-time variations ("great-grand-crotchfruit," "crotchfruit-on-board") and related terms ("crotch dropping," "crotch trophy," "crotch cricket"). Though most uses of "crotchfruit" are childfree and aggressive ("Rant!!! Crotchfruit at Starbucks," "My crotchfruit's screeching just *can't* be annoying"), the word has caught on with at least some parents, who perhaps found "brat" and "rug rat" lacking freshness. Could the childfree be doing the child-laden a favor?
Slang is, in Adams's words, "a natural linguistic release for human frustration," and Zeus knows parents have more kid-propelled frustrations than anyone else in the solar system — particularly the childfree. "Without intending to do so," Adams suggests, "these people have handed the instrument of release to parents" by adding so many kid-unfriendly terms to the slang vocabulary. The anti-mom volumes of the childfree dictionary are probably irredeemably foul — at least to my ears — but parental use of the kid-centric terms could have a positive effect: Adams speculates that "when parents appropriate the non-parents' mockery, the edge is taken off, and the word moves closer to the center of parent-child linguistic behavior."
But if repurposing the likes of "crotchfruit" sounds too daunting or stupid, there's another task proposed by childfreester Moore that I'm guessing some readers will embrace: "I'd especially like to hear any amusing names or terminology that breeders may have for us :-)"
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