Growing a Family
March 21, 2022
By NZB3
I’ve been bombarded with the term “Growing a family” one time too many by the Official Media so that I want to unpack it. I find ‘growing’ a family to be a loaded term in two ways. First up though, what is the meaning of the term?
Kiwi parenting websites and Google quickly inform me that ‘Growing’ a family simply means making it bigger either by adding babies or partners. But I thought we already had words for those things such as marriage and having children. Likewise, I had also thought ‘hiring’ and ‘induction’ were enough words for the language already without this new one that means both: Onboarding. Apparently there is a problem here with the English language that it has too many specific words and we need to get rid of some.
Reducing our vocabulary removes the tools we have to map out meaning. Strip away a word and a concept is taken away with it. If it was an important root word then an entire avalanche of meaning might slide away along with it. Increasing the vocabulary of a person, or the national discourse for that matter, very much tracks with intelligence. One of the many things Mike Judge got right in his film Idiocracy (2006) was an unintelligent future population with very small vocabularies.
The first way in which ‘Growing Families’ is a loaded term that it strips away biological boundaries. Anyone can ‘grow’ a family in these terms. No need for a womb, for biological reproduction, for Primary Sexual Characteristics, a man and a woman, or even a baby. A man getting ‘married’ to another man has “grown his family.” An old Hollywood star who adopts a Ukranian orphan has “grown her family” and perhaps also if she buys a cat or even a house plant¹. Maori Academics want in include rivers and rocks so I guess, now, a volcanic eruption or a nasty flood counts as “growing my family” in an increasing great blur of lost meaningfulness!
To mention you have a father or have had a child is exclusionary to the non-breeders. So, they are taking away the concepts that hurt them. The language is being altered to defamiliarise and delegitimise New Zealanders with Politically Incorrect terms such as man, woman, mother, father, husband, wife, son, daughter. It’s not enough that our Open Society does not morally or legally discriminate against non-breeders. It does not matter that they are now offered superior social status. The capitulation doesn’t stop them wanting more to the point where they now demand the epistemological and metaphysical territory too.
What Politically Correct term is “mother” to be replaced with? “Birthing Parent.” Father? “Non-gestational” or “non-birthing co-parent.” Instead of breastfeeding call it “chest-feeding.” Rather than sire a baby and parent him you are expected to gestate a gender-neutral ‘they’ (theyby?) and, in due course, receive a HAPPY NON-GESTATIONAL CO-PARENT’S DAY CARD on what used to b called Father’s Day.
What does a growing family mean? If you mentioned the growth of your family, you might mean that babies were born or people got married, increasing your family’s size. Growth – Definition, Meaning & Synonyms | Vocabulary.com
“Growing great families now…To grow great, healthy families, we as parents need to think about what our roles are as parents and consider how our actions will affect our children’s futures, no matter what age they are…Through reflection, and introspective thinking, we can help to create the initial building blocks to growing a strong and healthy family.” – Growing great families by KATE ANDERSON, Kiwi Families.co.nz
“Women have nothing left that’s ours. Anyone can appropriate our sex. We are referred to as “bleeders” and “pregnant people.” Biological men beat us out of our own spaces. “Women” doesn’t have any definition or meaning. And we’re expected to accept our own erasure. it’s gross.” – Sydney Watson, (March 2022); Carl Benjamin, Facebook
“Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen…Language is the medium in which we are conscious.” – Richard Mitchell
According to someone named Sydney Watson on Twitter the concept and word ‘woman’ has been erased. Apparently even at the Olympic level as the latest headlines tell us that Strong Woman Lia Thomas has beaten all of the “bleeders” or “pregnable people” or “cisgendered female swimming persons.” The locus of our society has shifted from breeders and their non-breeding support people to being all about the support people! Western Culture has lost track of the fact that our survival as a people, as a species even, totally relies on creating future generations. Surely we are in a Clown World situation. A Lemming Cycle situation where hundreds of thousands of pink and blue-haired they/thems are working out with gravity who will and will not win if they jump off the biological cliff.
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1 Ref. The Anti-Individuality in r-Selected Cultures, AHNZ
Ref. What is English language really?, AHNZ
Image ref. NZ Herald