(no subject)

[deckardcanine]

I've complained before about celebrity news sources, especially IMDb, saying that a man "became a father again" when he hadn't stopped being a father to the first child. It's now happened enough times that I've stopped pointing out instances.

Unfortunately, my parents noted the difficulty in finding a suitable substitute. To say that a man "had" a second child evokes anatomical confusion, even tho a man and a woman can "have" a child together. "Sired" is crude. "Begot" is archaic. "Welcomed" is so '50s. The best I can think to do is rework the sentence: "[Man] now has a second child, born Monday...."

What other languages have this problem, I wonder? English is so clumsy. Good thing clumsiness can be endearing.

Comments

[dhlawrence.livejournal.com]

You can say that so and so 'fathered' a child, but you can't really say that his wife/girlfriend/etc. 'mothered' a child at the same time.

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

The best I can do is "[man]'s wife gave birth to their second child today". Other phrasings tend to imply that the child was born out of wedlock, which is usually not the case.