Little Boy and Little Girl

ANYONE WHO has ever found himself, or, more typically, herself, in a playground minding a three-year-old has on innumerable occasions had to answer question, Is that your little boy (or little girl) ? The alternatives to little boy/little girl are boy/girl and son/daughter. Either pair would be accounted more formal, especially latter. Only little boy/little girl can describe in vernacular a boy or girl considered too old to be called a baby-usually age at which child walks unaided-and too young to be called a boy or girl without qualification-usually age of early elementary-school grades.1 By age of ten or eleven, boys and girls are seldom called little. A study that I have been engaged with on language used in children's literature has tended to corroborate these general observations and to raise question whether these expressions are compounds that merit inclusion in English dictionaries. 1. Philip Babcock Gove, editor-in-chief of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, fortunately published working guidelines governing inclusion of compounds in his dictionary.2 Self-explanatory compounds, he says, are to be excluded from dictionary. He adds that for W3 purposes the term self-explanatory designate[s] a regularly formed compound of which component elements are vocabulary entries, of which meaning, spelling, and pronunciation are readily attainable by addition of its component elements, and which consequently requires no formal definition.3 He then defines key words used in that statement, namely, regularly formed, compound, vocabulary entries, and attainable, and says that a failure to meet specifications of any one of these items disqualifies a compound as self-explanatory and requires its inclusion in dictionary. In next two sections I shall consider meanings Gove attributes to compound and to attainable

Developmental psychology · Girl · Gender Studies in Language · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Medicine · Psychology · Pediatrics