The quality of being a baby; the personality of an infant.

Doesn’t it seem strange to concoct a word like this by appending -ship to it? Maybe this is not the best example of this type of word-ship. Babyship strikes me as a context-dependent word that would plug a hole in the loose end of a thought in a way that makes the speaker seem diligently professorial. Adding -ship to words has potential for comedy, I think. Trees are reduced to papership. Straw and weeds are transformed to thatchship.

There was a period in my life when it seemed many adults I knew displayed characteristics of babyship. For a few months I was sensitive to the way grown adults would scream and stamp their feet or hands in protest of something to which they objected. The carried on like babies, literally. I still think it true that the characteristics of an infant’s personality will endure through adulthood. There are times, though, when I see in adults not just that personality but also the outright behaviour of babies.

I think, too, that words ending in -ship suffer a little bit from being connected with words like "starship" or "battleship." Climb aboard the babyship? I don’t think so. But that generally serious use of ship as meaning a sea-worthy craft has a way of trying to raise the meaning of other words, serving instead only to distort or ruffle their meaning.

"Babyship" looked to me like a word that would only appear in print in dictionaries, so it was neat to learn the British band No-Man wrote a song called Babyship Blue, which appears to evoke memories of infancy.

I ran to the water before I could swim
Lost in your hair
I saw the dawn, I saw the dawn
I touched the shining gown

It’s all I can do not to scream for you

[from lyrics.doheth.co.uk]