Baby please do go
Jeff suggests:
I’ve never heard of anyone giving birth to a full-grown adult except for in the Weekly World News. So let’s get rid of the “baby,” as in “She gave birth to a baby girl.”
Jeff suggests:
I’ve never heard of anyone giving birth to a full-grown adult except for in the Weekly World News. So let’s get rid of the “baby,” as in “She gave birth to a baby girl.”
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 at 10:24 am and is filed under Redundancies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Banned for Life is devoted to those expressions so gratingly overused that they should be forever banned from the nation's news reports.
George Orwell put it best:
"Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."
# # #
These are my most-loathed expressions:This site is about what not to write if you write news for a living. It's not about annoying expressions that crop up in everyday conversations.
If Katie Couric's saying it, please tell me about it. If it's your annoying brother-in-law, grit your teeth and be thankful half of all marriages end in divorce.
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January 31st, 2005 at 5:51 am
Perhaps more strange is “she gave birth to a bouncing baby boy.” I can imagine the doctors and nurses scrambling around, trying to catch the bouncing baby boy as it bounds around the room like a power ball.
June 29th, 2005 at 12:32 pm
/pedant
In this context bouncing means an alert, happy, reactive and therefore healthy baby boy.
The alliteration and the rule of three make it euphonious.
There is a fine line between pointing out meaningless phrases and just being a literalist curmudgeon.
Do you also have a problem with “bouncy” when it describes a vivacious young woman?
/pedant
