In a Time of Covid-19, I kid you not.

It’s official, All children in Western Australia should be in schools from Monday, May 18.

Since Covid-19 focussed our attention on students attending or not attending our schools, I have been surprised that so many commentators refer to our students as “Kids”.

When I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s calling children kids was almost unheard of. Kids, we were told, were young goats.

However, today kids is the generally accepted collective noun for children. It is universally used by media commentators, parents, letter writers, state premiers, ministers for education, education department spokespersons and even by teachers and principals… and some newspaper editors.

English is a beautiful language. A living language. One of the flaws of being a living language is that if enough people use a word or an expression, or even a mispronunciation, over time it eventually becomes “Proper English”.

For instance the word “nice” in previous centuries once meant wanton or foolish, which is not nice at all. People’s usage over time of nice to actually mean nice means that it no longer means foolish or wanton. Isn’t that nice?

No doubt Kids is now well established in the lexicon of educated English.

The ABC, once the arbiter of correct spoken English in Australia, has long been cluttered with gunna, gotta, comin’, goin, watcha, would’ve, could’ve, should’ve and other previously frowned upon abbreviations.

We have also noted over time that the well-known expletive F and C words, previously regarded as vocabulary bombshells, are now more and more  used in everyday speech. They are certainly being used, perhaps overused, in film and TV presentations. A television drama I watched the other evening would have been thirty minutes shorter if the expletives had been deleted. Watch any stand up comedian these days. They will be prattling along with an occasional laugh or giggle coming from the audience. Then they throw in the heavy artillery expletive F and C words and everybody falls off their seats laughing. Oh, yes. Expletives are an obvious sign of great wit. Maybe not. It is a wonder how Bob Hope, Groucho Marx and Jerry Seinfeld ever made an expletive free living.

Those F and C words were once never, ever used in polite society, especially in the presence of the fairer sex. Now it the fairer sex who are proving very adept at dropping their own  expletive F and C bombshells.                                                                                                   

Somebody once said that the present day  coarseness of the feminine vocabulary  just proves that the feminist movement stopped women from acting like ladies but has not yet taught them how to behave like gentlemen. I don’t know who said that, actually. I hope he was killed off by a Feminazis in a gentle and caring way.

As those previously taboo words have taken permanent residence in our popular English expression, we now  need to invent newer expletives to bring back some shock value.                       When I was very young, Bloody and Bugger were thought to be very rude words. In fact, the word bloody caused a sensation when it was first uttered on the English stage by Eliza Doolittle’s character in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion early last century.. Not any more.

They have been replaced by the F and C words. No doubt in the not so distant future newer words will be found to shock and awe us.

As for kids. I spent over forty years working in schools. When I retired as a primary school principal in 2002,  I received quite a few cards. Some were even complimentary. Of all those cards, one that I clearly remember was from a mother who said, “ Thank you for helping with the education of my boys over the last ten years. I especially thank you for never calling them kids.”

I wonder if any mother in 2020 would  express such a genteel opinion. Not bloody* likely!

*Insert your own expletive of choice.