Strange use of "baby daddy"

[Wilson Gray]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 4:33 PM, <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
>
> "baby daddy" means 'father'

If that was the only thing that it meant, and not the father of a
*specific* baby, then what would be the point of inventing it? Of
course, with non-standard, in-group jargon, out-group, one never knows
WTF the motivation is. Nevertheless, if one takes into consideration
that this is not a lexical innovation, but a syntactico-phonological
innovation:
_baby's daddy_ > _baby daddy_
typical of BE.

Then it should be fully transparent that, in _baby daddy_, _baby_ is
not simply a redundant addition, adding nothing at all to the meaning
of its base, like
_dusk dark_, round circle_
and it cannot be the case that there is a semantic one-to-one and onto
mapping from _baby daddy_ to _father_.
Indeed, way back when I first heard the plural, _baby daddies_, used
in the show-opening voice-over of some program, it gave me a chuckle,
because, to the unhip, it must have seemed that the meaning of the
term was "babies that are, in some bizarre sense, also fathers."
--
-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

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