Baby Talk

How many times have you found yourself sitting in front of the television set on a late afternoon or late night waiting for a ball game, the news or your favorite needlepoint or gardening show only to find yourself watching some nonsensical program like Access Hollywood or TMZ because you're just too damn lazy and comfortable to take the effort to punch a button on the remote control. And then, before you know it some "reporter" specializing in celebrities, such as Mary Hart, appears on screen to breathlessly announce that a female actress, singer or celebutard is showing a "baby bump" which means that said woman is with child, pregnant or, to use the current patois, "preggers."
If you are anything like your faithful correspondent the use of the term "baby bump" is like dragging a nail across a blackboard when the term is not used while speaking to children ("No, honey. Maria is not gotten fat. She has a baby bump.") or by children ("Mommy? Is that lady going to have a baby? She has a baby bump." "No, Junior. That old cow just has a beer belly.")or by people who seem somewhat retarded or just trying to be cute. The same goes for the word "preggers." The word "preggers" is a term best used, and should be only used, by adolescents in describing their schoolmates who are about to drop out of school and go on welfare and become regular customers of the local WIC center.
To hear a person in the media, who apparently is an adult with a college education, use the term "baby bump" and the word "preggers" is not unlike when this writer was a callow youth hearing the local gray-haired news reader use the word "groovy." It was just silly and made the user sound and look silly. It was tantamount with one's father, a veteran of the Marines in the Pacific during World War Two, wearing paisley shirts and bell-bottomed Levis to church because he wanted to be "with it." Just embarrassing. Thank God that Baron Nib never did any such silly thing. He was always a proper gentleman in his behavior and dress.
This writer has noticed an infantilization of the spoken and written word that he finds disturbing. It goes beyond "baby bump" and "preggers." All too many times he has heard a person on television or radio, or read articles in the newspaper in which the reporter describes a frightening incident as "scary." In the old days such incidents were described as "frightening", "terrifying", "horrifying" or "disturbing." The word "scary" was a children's word that could be used of anything from falling off a skateboard to fighting off an ax murderer or watching a horror movie. It seems that a certain segment of society has not progressed from grade school descriptions of emotions because they have neither matured or they feel that the viewers are rather stupid.
If one listens or reads the outpourings from the news media and popular culture one can find many instances of baby-talk put forth by people, who by their educations alone, should know and (one would hope)desire to speak and write in an adult manner. And these people seem to show no embarrassment about using terms and words that were heretofore used exclusively by children. It's a wonder.
Other words or terms that have come into common usage in the media are "poo" instead of feces or offal (one wonders when Katie Couric will break new ground by saying "poo-poo","poopy" or "do-do"; "doing the nasty" instead of making love, mating or fornicating; "bad guy" instead of criminal, enemy, jerk or idiot. The list goes on and on.
Language changes over the years and centuries, but usually it becomes more sophisticated instead of degraded and infantile. This writer would suggest that news writer and reporters, before using words that they feel might be somewhat suspect (and they DO know unless they are complete idiots) that they look in a Roget's Thesaurus, the King James Bible or Shakespeare to find an adult word to replace the baby talk that they have been babbling to us for the past twenty years.
One shudders to think of what the next twenty years hold for the language. Perhaps a spoken form of text messaging. CN U DG IT?