Hacker News Reader

Comment by n6242 | Hacker News Reader

Language should be adequate to the context of a conversation. If you were writing a legal document, or some policy for a kindergarten it might make sense to make that distinction, but this is a public forum with many non-native speakers. Parents is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say parents we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.

View on HN

“Child raiser” is perfectly adequate to the context of a conversation about people who are raising children.

Wouldn't the employees of the day care be able to be considered as "child raiser" if I follow the meaning of the words?

No, because child care (aka day care) is temporary and optional. A person who is raising a child has taken responsibility for them through their childhood—metaphorically “raising” them up into adulthood.

What an insult to someone who has taken on the responsibility of raising a child. Of course they should be called parents. A man doesn’t adopt a son only to be called his “child raiser”. Stop this foolish line of thought.

You're the only one in this thread not attaching the same connotations of "child raiser" to "parent" and considering one lesser than the other. I don't know what's more insulting, being called a child raiser, or considering child raiser to be off-brand parent rather than a generalization of the term.

"No man goes into education to be called 'instructor', they're 'teachers'."

"No woman goes into CS to be called 'coder', they're 'developers'."

Some children are raised by grandparents, aunts or uncles, siblings, etc.

There are plenty of “child raisers” who provide more care than a daycare and less than a parent.

And since we’re being technically correct, raising a child is always optional (even for the parent).

I agree. That’s why I said child raisers have “taken responsibility.” I could have also said “accepted responsibility.”

I wouldn’t consider a parent who opts out of raising their child to be a child raiser.

Language should be adequate to the context of a conversation. If you were writing a legal document, or some policy for a kindergarten it might make sense to make that distinction, but this is a public forum with many non-native speakers. Child-raiser is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say child-raisers we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.

child-riser is a lovely neologism, more self-explanatory than caretaker, but still caretaker is well established.

and to clarify: I chuckled with sympathy reading your response :-)

Caretaker is not well-established where I am. A caretaker takes care of grounds of schools and other similar large buildings.

I see. and that's indeed one of the two main meanings.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/caretaker

hmmm is there some extended n-gram search these days where you can search for a specific word *with a specific meaning*?

It's not that it's bad neologism. It's that neologism is bad in general. :-)

Every word you just wrote was a neologism at some point.

New words are bad in general? How so?

Change is hard and expensive. The juice needs to be worth the squeeze.

Far too often those introducing new words (or even worse redefining existing ones) are playing power games with their in groups best interests in mind, not the rest of us.

IMO I felt that battle was lost couple of years back when my wife was pregnant with our youngest. We were looking for CDC guidelines on covid booster for expectant mothers. The website mentions "pregnant people". That's when I felt discourse is evolving to cater to the edge cases.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...

I don't think 'people' is really an edge case.

It is newspeak to avoid saying „pregnant women“.

Personally I think women are people.

So you're saying the CDC should not cater to the edge cases? Where are we drawing the line? 10% of the population? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? 0.001%? That last one is still thousands of people. Does your opinion hold for all edge cases or just those involving gender identities?

If there is a place I'd expect to "cater to edge cases" including those that only make up a fraction of a permille of the population, it'd be the CDC because they have to address hundreds of millions of people so even a one-in-a-million edge case still represents hundreds of people.

What an absurd complaint. "Expectant mothers" is much less direct and more euphemistic than "pregnant people".

That's not catering to edge cases; it's just clear, easy to understand communication.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com