Jabberwocky: Parental Units of the World Unite
The top five nicknames for mom and dad.
by Mark Peters
September 26, 2008
Nicknameologists are already in mourning over the end of President Bush's second term. The man has been a world champion giver of nicknames (including Turd Blossom, Pootie-Poot, and Congressman Kickass), as well as a record-breaking receiver. Whether you call him Dubya, Shrubya, Spurious George, President I'm-so-buff, Flight-suit-in-chief, Bushie, The Decider, or Commander Cuckoo-Bananas (as Homer Simpson tastefully put it), there's a Bush nickname to suit your temperament and budget.
Nicknaming comes with the royal scepter and magic slippers of world leadership — but what about household leaders? Parents need nicknames too, though my attempt at a Top Five parental nicknames produced a scrawny list, pointing in one direction. Drum roll, please:
5) breeders
As the first known use, circa 1979, indicates — "There are even those gays who are militantly nonreproductive, using the hostile term 'breeders' to refer to child-producing heterosexuals." — this term started in the gay community. Not surprisingly, it's been embraced by the child-free movement and plenty of parents use the word jokingly as well.
4) stroller -----
See my column from last month, in which the stroller set, the stroller brigade, and even the stroller mafia are discussed.
3) parentals
More in five seconds.
2) 'rents
Hold on just a nano-jiffy.
1) parental units
We have a winner, and it wasn't close. By far, "parental units" is the most common, solid, satisfying slang term for parents — and it's the proud progenitor of "rents" and "parentals" too.
"Parental units" is common as mud and can be found in books, blogs, newspapers and magazines — though not many dictionaries, except for my own Yada Yada Doh: 111 TV Words That Made the Leap from the Screen to Society. The term debuted on Saturday Night Live, during the first Coneheads' sketch, "The Coneheads at Home" (Jan. 15, 1977), when Connie Conehead said to Beldar and Prymaat, "Good morning, parental units."
"Parental units" is typical Coneheadese; they also coined "irregular sound patterns" for music, "time coordinates" for time, and "sleep chamber" for bed. Perhaps future historians will discover that the Coneheads are responsible for other euphemistic terms, such as "trash item" (trash), "heritage act" (oldies band), "alternative interrogation methods" (torture) and "low-information voter" (clueless voter).
When non-coneheaded Americans call parents "parental units," it implies that there's something mechanical, absurd and inauthentic about the units in question or parenthood in general. Well, at least that was the original connotation: the term is so common today that there's very little insult left. It's mainly used by pen-pushers like myself, who get tired of writing "parent" over and over again.
Like any successful word, parental units has given birth itself: In Slang and Sociability, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill linguist Connie Eble mentions how "parental units" has been shortened into "parentals" and further clipped to form "'rents." She adds that, "A variant clipped form is rental unit, making explicit the financial dependence of students on their parents." That's a neato development, since Jonathan Green — in Casell's Dictionary of Slang — suggests that the original term plays upon "rental units." So "rental units" may be the parent and child of "parental units," which sounds disturbing until you remember we're just talking about words.
Other terms have fallen from the tree at a different angle: "maternal unit" and "paternal unit" are out there, plus a few others demonstrated by this blogger: "Oh. So much to be thankful for! We had a great weekend in the O.C. with the grand-parental and great-grand-parental units." A rarer variation was coined when a writer for Elle discussed post-birth romance: "I hoped he would silently accept this new state in which we were a perfectly functioning parental eunuch team."
"Parental eunuch" isn't the most prosperous or spiffy member of the "parental unit" clan, but I guess even word families can have a dark sheep . . .
What nicknames for parents have you heard or used? Let us know in comments.
©2008 Mark Peters and Babble
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