Grant & Martha:

Re: "squeejawed", my father, born in 1910 in Mosinee, Wisconsin, used the term "gee-jawed" in a similar manner. As a driver of teams of animals, he would use "gee" to turn right and "haw" to turn left. I have no specific knowlege of the potential relationships, but the phonetic, conceptual and regional connections seem to close to be coincidental.

j

Stephen Mikesell said:

At the end of the discussion about the term for baby-sat children, “care-giver” was mentioned. So how about “care-kids” or “carekids”? It carries a punch and has good connotations.

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Children whom one babysits? Clearly, "sittees."

Re redheads. I do think the prejudice against the redheaded is much stronger in the UK than in the US. I remember some sketches by comic Catherine Tate on ginger racism.

Save the gingers!

"I'm going to beat you like a redheaded step-child."

I've never heard that particular phrase using redheaded step-child, but a couple years ago I worked at Books-A-Million (a bookstore chain in the south). The store I worked at was one of the oldest in the district, and it showed: dirty carpet, broken cabinets, mismatching bookshelves, etc. The location was once a hot spot for consumerism so it got a lot of business, but after a while, most shoppers bypassed the area to go to the newer, more recent shopping meccas. A co-worker once described our store as the "redheaded step-child of Books-A-Million." I'd never heard of anything ignored referred to as a redheaded step-child, but I immediately understood the reference and thought it quite witty. Think about the Brady Bunch: if Mr. Brady had three boys and one redheaded girl, she would kind of be the odd one out out of Carol's "three lovely girls with hair of gold like their mother."

I think that a babysitter (or caregiver) who has developed a true family bond should consider the children "para-spawn" (or "feremeiparvulus" coming from the latin fere mei parvulus or "almost my kids") and she should be "para-parentus."

I also think that I am VERY prejudiced toward ginger women. Almost every man I know agrees with me that red hair gives an automatic three point bump in the man-law 1 to 10 beauty scale.

I really enjoyed the question about the babysitter / child relationship. I would agree that another word group is needed and I had a similar idea to a prior poster: put the word "care" with the relationship. One, we need a word that kids can use to express their relationship with a babysitter. (What 9-year-old wants to admit that they have a babysitter?) Second, there is no emotion in an employee / charge relationship, but many, many babysitters have a close to familial relationship with charges. The word (going both directions) needs to convey some emotion.

I believe that you could put "care" with a variety of familial relationships and get a word with emotional impact. As a babysitter, I could be a care-parent, or even better a care-mom or a care-dad. My charges could be my care-children or my care-child, or even more affectionately, my care-son or care-daughter. In other words, I am using the prefix "care" in a similar way to which I might use the prefix "grand", "step", or "foster". Plus, I think there would be little confusion in hearing the term care-parent or care-child… it sounds like what is it.

Works for me. What do you think?

A woman wonders about a phrase from her past: “I'm going to beat you like a red-headed stepchild.” Martha and Grant discuss gingerism, or prejudice against redheads.

In the late 1960s I spent several months in the island of Cyprus. This was in connection with a psychological research project that I was conducting with a colleague of mine JamesTenzel M.D.

While the island was at that time divided between the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot areas, we were allowed to circulate freely over the whole island. One place we visited was the village of Bellapais and its famous Abbey (Abbaye de la Paix). This village was the home of the British author Lawrence Durell during the time when he was writing the Alexandria Quartet. He also wrote a memoir titled Bitter Lemons about his time on Cyprus.

The Abbey was founded by a group of French monks in the 12th century, and apparently abandoned in the 13th or 14th century. The story we were told (and the reason for my note here) was that these monks were all of fair skin and redheaded. Soon after the Abbey was established, children began to be born in the village with similar characteristics even though the village was composed largely of Mediterranean types who were dark-haired and dark skinned.

The story goes that after a while it became too embarrassing for the church to maintain this Abbey under such circumstances and it was abandoned.

While I do not know whether the reference to redheaded stepchildren can be traced back to this obscure village in northern Cyprus, it struck me when I heard Martha and Grant's program this morning.

When we visited this charming village and its Abbey, the views over the northern Mediterranean were breathtaking and it was easy to see its attraction for both its founding religious order and for writers such as Durell who obviously fell in love with this village.

Incidentally, for those not familiar with the island of Cyprus it is replete with ruins artifacts and constant reminders of Western and Middle Eastern civilizations dating back to the Phoenicians. Cyprus was the essential linchpin for all empires in the eastern Mediterranean and as a result was conquered by all such civilizations for the last 4000 years. It is also the setting for which Shakespearean play? (Think Venetian)!

Grant was brainstorming and came up with padawans. Martha suggested Watsons. I suggest we conflate the two terms and call kids who are babysat "Padawatsons"

I knew that being "ginger" in the UK was reason enough to be picked on, but I was surprised that a few years ago South Park had an episode "Ginger Kids" where one of the characters (Cartman of course) says something like all red-heads are unable to walk around during the daylight hours because they are evil and have no souls.