Half-orphan

[Jonathan Lighter]

Late 19th C. Irish-American broadside ballad, "The Flying Cloud" :

"We ran and fought with many a ship down on the Spanish Main,
Killed many a man and left his wife and orphans to remain...."


That cite isn't in OED, which, by the way, allows that only one of an "orphan's" parents may be dead, but says that this usage is rare. None of the early citations seem to apply unequivocally to this sort of case.

It is (or used to be) possible to be an "orphan" in an "orphanage" if one parent were still alive but incapable of caring for the child.

Perh. there's more in EDD, but I don't have one handy.

JL

sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: sagehen
Subject: Re: Half-orphan
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>This is a most curious term. I had always thought an orphan was a person
>who had lost at least ONE parent, but not necessarily both. Therefore,
>half-orphan is superfluous for me.
>Fritz J
>
>>>> gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM 06/07/05 02:20PM >>>
>That seems like an oversight as well, then. The meaning of half-orphan
>wasn't transparent to me when I saw it today. I was right in my guess at its
>meaning, but I wasn't confident till I saw it defined.
>
>Benjamin Barrett
>Baking the World a Better Place
>www.hiroki.us
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: American Dialect Society
>> [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Laurence Horn
>
>> Couldn't the absence of "half-orphan" and "half-orphaned"
>> from dictionaries be attributable largely to the productivity
>> of the formation process and transparency of its results? I
>> wouldn't expect "half-eaten" to get its own entry, for
>> example, or "two-buttoned".
~~~~~~~~~~
This makes sense to me. My own understanding of "orphan" is a minor child
both of whose parents are dead (not merely absent).
A. Murie


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