On Sun Jul 9, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Sooo...what do you call a boy infant's genital package, assuming that's
> the word/phrase he will probably pick up? "Penis" sounds too clinical;
> "cock," too sexual; "wee-wee," too goofy.
Wee-wee is goofy, but pee-pee isn't. It has the huge advantage of also being what you do with it, thus making it one of the most common and natural-sounding words in his vocabulary. It's the most common word used by other kids and other kids' parents.
If it still sounds goofy, I think it's just your aversion to baby talk. But I think that'll go away. There's a good reason for baby talk. Babies can understand our emotional sonic gestures long before the words. Baby talk exaggerates the sound of our emotions so they can hear them more clearly. It's kind of like speaking clearly to a foreigner. The reason for the higher voice is (a) the main thing we express to them is how much we love them, and joy makes our voices rise, which we then exaggerate; and (b) they have high voices, and if your trying to engage them, it's natural to mimic them.
After that of course it all gets stylized, which serves a third purpose which might be most important of all: we speak in baby talk because it makes us feel like babies. It makes us feel more in tune with what they might be feeling in their little baby heads. It makes us feel like their equals, like we can play with them in a way they can understand. And lastly, it allows us to act out and take care of them the way we wanted to be taken care of when we were babies -- which can be a very comforting thing for us.
Michael