"young people," or, "there is a fine line between respect and absurdity; my church has crossed it"

[edenfalling]

Apropos of nothing in particular, there is a pernicious trend in my church's RE program toward replacing the word "children" with the phrase "young people." This began as a quirk of our interim DRE, but our new DRE apparently adopted it as a matter of policy and the phrase has now become so pervasive it's infected our weekly newsletter.

It drives me up the wall.

I think the reasoning behind the phrase is to emphasize the personhood of children, so as to ensure that teachers and other adults respect said children. That is absolutely fine in principle. The problem is that there is nothing inherently demeaning about the words "child" or "children." They can be made demeaning when applied to adults -- and "childish" is always an insult, whereas "childlike" can be positive or negative, depending on context -- but to call a child a child is simply stating a fact. Childhood is the stage of human life between birth and, depending on your culture and perspective, somewhere between 13 and 18-21 years of age. A person in that age group is a child. End of story.

"Young people" is an awkward and pointless circumlocution, especially since in the rest of the world, it means young adults (and sometimes teenagers), not children in general. Its use also rests on faulty logic: extending the principle of emphasizing everyone's personhood regardless of age, we should start calling adults "old people" -- and fat chance getting that to fly.

I, of course, am even worse from the perspective of the "young people" campaigners. I go around calling children "kids," because I am hopelessly informal. This means I am, linguistically speaking, equating children to baby goats -- a demeaning comparison if there ever was one! Clearly I should be drummed out of the RE program posthaste and sent in for reeducation.

...

Curiously, I note that not one of the kids I've taught has even complained about being called a kid, let alone a child. I further suspect they would think the "young people" terminology is somewhere between silly and incomprehensible. I know I would have when I was their age.

Sometimes kids are a lot more sensible than adults.

This brought to you by the campaign for common sense in language.

Comments

[alchymie.livejournal.com]

Youngsters or younglings are perfectly usable English words. They're not even vaguely gender-specific, as youths might be interpreted as being.

[edenfalling]

I think the unspoken rules of organizational bureaucratic language would disallow "youngsters" as too informal and "younglings" as too archaic, but even so, they would annoy me less than "young people" -- especially since the reflexive use of "young people" is leading to such ridiculous phrases as "if you are the adult of a young person, please make arrangements to blah blah blah," instead of the everyday English "if you are responsible for a child, please make arrangements to blah blah blah."

[nopenniesplease.livejournal.com]

Please excuse me while I go and call all the littl'uns I know "younglings". :D

[alchymie.livejournal.com]

It's a tad archaic, I concede, but a perfectly good word, and certainly better than young people -- or worse, young persons.

(Which are pejorative, when you stop to consider. I mean, young lady/man is what you say to a kid who's in serious trouble. "Young lady, WHAT is the meaning of this!?")

[edenfalling]

I should try that on Sunday, actually, and see what my class thinks. :-)

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

O_o

[edenfalling]

Exactly!