A woman, her child, and the child's grandmother
The on-line Union Tribune at SanDiego.com has a story about that Air Force jet that crashed into a residential neighborhood. One paragraph lists the dead this way:
A mother, her young child and the child's grandmother died ... A second child was missing and presumed dead before the search was suspendedFurther on, this unfortunate family is described by neighbors thus:
[the] 36-year-old mother was in the home with her two sons – a 2-month-old and 1-year-old. The mother worked as a nurse at a hospital. The woman's mother also was in the house.I don't have any idea why the reporter chose to identify this family in words that signal that the grandmother is the child's father's mother. It's very odd.
(hat tip to a commenter at Language Log, where they were talking about something else entirely)
3 Comments:
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At 9:41 PM, December 10, 2008
fev had this to say...
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At 6:20 PM, December 11, 2008
The Ridger, FCD had this to say...
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At 9:50 PM, December 12, 2008
fev had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->OK, I'm not yet prepared to offer a testable hypothesis on this one, but if I was, I'd probably start with the general Foxification of the world: if a woman of childbearing age has kids, the most important identity she has is "mom." So it'd be a pragmatic violation of sorts to say "a woman, her mother and her [blank]-old son, but you can't say "a mother, her mother and her child," so you have to -- I think the technical term is "go around your a** to get to your elbow."
If social roles were less important, you could say "a woman, her [age] son and her [age] mother" with no chance of ambiguity. But then we couldn't have "missing mom" stories, could we.
Sorry to go on. I got accused of being an anthropologist today, I think. Not that it's not an honorable profession, but ...
"Mom, daughter, and grandson"? Or can't you be a mom and grandmom at the same time?
Sure, from that pesky biological standpoint -- at least, you could be somebody's mom. But to be an unmodified mom in the tabloid world, you need to look like -- you know, a _missing mom_. Somebody that mom's age is a "grandma," especially if she knocks over a bank.
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