Tiny mini-rant

[taimatsu]

A swift rant about something driving me nuts on and off at the moment.

Kittens. People. Two different things.

You are not a kitten. Your friends and social group are not kittens. Bisexuals are not kittens. Only kittens, young instances of the animal commonly called a cat, are, in fact, kittens. Please remember this. Thank you.

Comments

[taimatsu]

No, John, this is precisely my point. Infant cats are, in this usage, ascribed qualities of cuteness, sweetness, fluffiness, helplessness, smallness, etc. Infant cats in this usage lack attributes of maturity, adulthood, sexuality in the sense of having one, and are considered not to be responsible for their actions.

You are not small; you are not fluffy in any possible sense, either physically or metaphorically; you are not helpless or particularly sweet or overwhelmingly cute in the way a kitten is, though you are not unattractive - your attractiveness is, however, linked to your sexuality, which cutesy-wutesy kittens do not have.

Shall I compare thee to a kitten? Thou'rt basically completely different and the comparison is essentially pointless. You do not manifest good qualities in the same way as an infant cat. Very few people do.

My point is that if you refer to a person as a kitten, you are referring only to wishy-washy cutesy-wutesy aspects of their self, and leaving out anything which makes them an ADULT person, like their sexual drive, their responsibility for their actions, their ability to say no. It's dehumanising and objectifying, and I really dislike it.

You could refer to a baby in this way, perhaps, but not an adult.

In what way do the crowd who go to B-Movie often, and are referred to by some as the Kitten Collective, manifest good qualities in the same way as an infant cat? Go on, tell me.

[j4.livejournal.com]

My point is that if you refer to a person as a kitten, you are referring only to wishy-washy cutesy-wutesy aspects of their self, and leaving out anything which makes them an ADULT person, like their sexual drive

You keep mentioning sex drive as though it's some kind of prerequisite for being an adult. You might want to think about the implications of that.

And on the language front: you'll find it very hard to make a case for any particular aspect of the evolution of language being "wrong" unless you believe that language was handed to us in some kind of perfect form by some external authority/divinity/etc. (If that's the case then, well, you're entitled to your belief, and I suppose your crusade against "bad" language would follow on logically from that, but I'll reserve the right to disagree.)

Language is, to an extent, defined by its usage. Some words and constructions that you quite happily use "correctly" now would have been judged "wrong" 100 years ago -- but the language has evolved since then. Where do you draw the line? When does something stop being "wrong" and become accepted usage?

For example, I bet you call people "stupid" when you don't actually mean that they're dull, lifeless, acting as if in a stupor ... don't you? Jane Austen would have been horrified. English users turned "brid" into "bird" because it was easier to say -- was that wrong? Did everybody have bad spelling before the concept of standardised spelling existed? (And, more importantly, did the lack of standards make the language any less expressive or any less useful? Was Shakespeare a worse writer because of it? What about Spenser? -- Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.)

I agree with you about excessive fluffiness being irritating, but I don't think it's because they're using a word incorrectly. No, the people who use it are not Actually Really Real Live Juvenile Felines -- big deal. If somebody said that you were "really sweet", would you object on the grounds the word "sweet" refers to one of the different tastes the tongue can distinguish, and is therefore irrelevant to somebody's opinion of you as an adult human being? ... This crusade against metaphor is just tilting at windmills.