{"id":12308,"date":"2008-10-15T08:30:16","date_gmt":"2008-10-15T08:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wordswarm.net\/dictionary\/babyship.html"},"modified":"2008-10-15T08:30:16","modified_gmt":"2008-10-15T08:30:16","slug":"babyship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2008\/10\/15\/babyship.html","title":{"rendered":"Babyship"},"content":{"rendered":"

The quality of being a baby; the personality of an infant. <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

"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<\/a>, which appears to evoke memories of infancy.<\/p>\n

\n

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<\/p>\n

It’s all I can do not to scream for you <\/p>\n

[from lyrics.doheth.co.uk<\/a>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The quality of being a baby; the personality of an infant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whats-the-word","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/saumAn-babyship","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}