baby daddy

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

While Wilson is right that "baby daddy" is not the EXACT semantic equivalent of "father," it is ALSO not the EXACT semantic equivalent of "baby's father"; it also usually indicates that the child was born out of wedlock or at any rate that the paternity cannot be assumed. (And aren't all fathers "fathers of specific babies"?)

The Darth Vader context (and the real-world knowledge that men do not give birth) makes the secondary meaning the only one that makes sense, suppressing the genitive meaning in favor of a sort of dative one-- as if it were spelled "baby-daddy".

I don't see why the only interpretation that makes sense so difficult for people to accept, except that there is a normal human tendency (often noted by psycholinguists) to cling stubbornly to  the first interpretation that crosses one's mind (even if that interpretation depends on the assumption that the speaker has made a stupid mistake), rejecting all others as "wrong". There is no single right or wrong answer. Compounds in English are subject to various interpretations. The "white house" is not just the place where Mr. Obama currently resides. Nor is etymology at all binding (as Wilson seems to believe). Sometimes, a baby sitter is somebody who watches adults. Or even sits ON babies. Yes, there are dialects in which the possessive marker may be deleted, and "baby daddy" seems to have arisen in one of them as a term meaning 'acknowledged parent of the child'. But "I am your baby daddy" does not have to mean 'I am father of your baby' any more than "I am your babysitter" h!
 as to mean 'I am temporary custodian for your children' rather than 'I am temporary child-custodian of you'.
*********************************
Wilson wrote:

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

If that was the only thing that it meant, and not the father of *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,
<snip>
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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