User:Soap/dolls

Introduction

From a memory of an early job where a small group of tourists came to me and one young man asked

Do you hire girls here, too, or just boys?

(As best my memory serves me.) Which sticks in my mind to this day because while 17-year-old male high school students will happily play on a boys' football team and use the boys' bathroom during breaks, it's a very rare situation where a native speaker would say something as simple as

I'm a boy.

Even if the context narrowed the choice of available words to just boy and girl.

man/woman

woman

lady

It may be that lady implies the presence of a man, but it seems also that the use of the word differs in specific social situations.

Words for children

boy

A man who works with one thing, often overwhelmed by it.
You all right there, soap boy? It's almost lunch time.

girl

kid

Notably, in English, kids don't call each other kids, at least not as a term of address.

Hey kids! Wait up!

automatically implies an adult speaker. This may be different in other languages.

child ~ children

diary

To my surprise, in a diary I wrote when I was 8 years old, I said "I will miss having the other children [here]". Which means I thought of both myself and my classmates as children. When I was writing at age 10–11, I seem to have subconsciously avoided both child and kid and their plural forms, and yet i suspect the absence of these words would be hardly noticeable to anyone not specifically looking for them.

I'm not sure why this is.

It's possible that, at age 8, being young was so omnipresent that it was inseparable from my identity. Just a few years later, my identity was built around my personality and not just about being a kid. But I kept to this subconscious writing style even when I wrote about children much younger than me, essentially as if the words child and kid didnt exist.

other words for children

young'un ~ youngin probably not used by children, but i never grew up with this so I cant be sure
preteen not normally used by children, or even adults, except in contexts when the listener expects to hear about teenagers or older adults
tyke again not much used by children, seems to be slightly more common for boys despite being gender-neutral
tomboy can be used for adults due to lack of a convenient word such as *tomman; tom- is a prefix although we list it as just tom

Other words

guy

doll

Nearly always female, and when referring to toys, typically for large soft dolls and not the toy soldier type which are called action figures and are targeted towards boys. Puppets are for some reason rarely considered dolls, unlike some other languages where the words overlap and perhaps some where there is just one word for both.

Our stick figures are called dolls in some languages too, yet only 0 out of the 634,949,346 hits of Google for bathroom dolls are of the stick figures i've seen on signs.