Baby Animals

I was on such a great roll for a while with my blog posts, but I am back to being sporadic.  I'm sure if you had been on the edge of your seat for the last post in my series on redundancies, you would have long fallen off.  I'm fairly certain this did not happen to anyone, not because I believe that gravity went haywire, but because I don't think anyone was that excited about the end of the redundancy series.  Maybe I underestimate myself.

Anyway, my last pet peeve when it comes to redundancies is when people say, "There were baby bunnies at the pet store", or "My cat just bad baby kittens."  This bugs me to no end because the words bunny and kitten are the words to call the babies of rabbits and cats, respectively.  They never refer to adult varieties of these animals; you could never say "There were adult bunnies at the pet store", or "My cat just had adult kittens".  Statements like that are just semantically incorrect.  I also hear it a lot with baby chicks, rather than just chicks as the babies of chickens or other birds.  It's one thing if you don't know the name for the babies, so you might say "baby horse" or "baby rabbit", but a baby bunny just makes no sense to me.

I should admit that it's often little kids that use these types of phrases, but because they're kids, I don't expect them to know better.  What I do expect is their parents not to mind if I have the urgent need to correct them! ;o)