[Ads-l] "kid" > "it"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Jan 12 05:35:21 UTC 2015


>From Facebook:

"... take the _kid_ from her and give _it_ to someone intelligent."

As I would say. But, in my experience, "they"/"them" is *far* more common
than "it" as the pronoun for both "child" and "kid." <sigh!>

Apropos of nothing (remember when this phrase was hip?), I've seen
instances from the 19th c. of "it" used not only for "child" but also for
both "boy" and "girl" when referring to pre-adolescents even  as old as
twelve. Abstracting away from the fact that, generally, twelve-year-olds
*are* adolescents, these days.

-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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