Everyone wants to be cool. Even me, the uncoolest of the lot, wants to be cool. For kids, it’s in order to attract a mate (just dare to deny it). For us adults it’s because we want people to pay our bills, and people don’t pay bills rendered by the uncool, only by the cool. I think that’s what cool ultimately boils down to. Getting the bill paid.
I remember back when I was in the tourism sector, running tours for American school ... er … And that’s where the problems all started. Generally aged between 14 and 17 years, mostly female, accompanied by their teachers as chaperones, what did we call these persons for whom we were running discovery tours of old Europe?
Well, I was taken to task—in a most friendly manner, I’ll add—after I had referred to them, outside their earshot, as what I believed they legally were: children. I had a statutory basis on which to use the term, being the Children Act 1948, which states that it is an Act to make further provision for the care or welfare, up to the age of eighteen and, in certain cases, for further periods, of boys and girls when they are without parents or have been lost or abandoned by, or are living away from, their parents, or when their parents are unfit or unable to take care of them and in certain other circumstances. The implications of these young Americans being lost or abandoned, we don’t need to dwell upon here. Needless to say, the point is that a boy or girl who is not yet 18 years of age is a child.
No. It seems that the ambit of the language used in the UK’s Children Act 1948 did not stretch to the terminology used in the United States of America circa 1980 to 1990. To gain a handle on what exactly a child is or isn’t in the US, I did a little rooting and came up with a piece of 2022 legislation, which did not, however, make its way onto the statute book, the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, which, in its bill form, was a Bill to prohibit the use of Federal funds to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10.
Oh. So, a child in the US is someone aged under 10 (at least the definition was at odds with the act’s title). That means someone aged 0 to 9, I think. If we take under to mean what it … means: someone who has not yet attained the age of 10. The bill is, so far as I know, still in committee, but it takes a narrow view of the definition of a child, the under-10s generally being referred to as pre-teens (if teen means someone aged 10 to 19, which it does in the Dutch language) or as younger pre-teens (if teen means someone aged between their 13th and 20th birthdays, as in English, being an age that ends with the suffix -teen).
When the Sexual Offences Act was passed in England & Wales in 1967, it defined what constitutes a sexual offence. I was very young at the time, but I wonder whether there was an outburst of confusion at the act’s passing, with people thinking it was set up to promote sexual offences. The confusion could potentially have stemmed from the fact it did not proclaim itself as the “Stop the Sexual Offences Act” or, as with money-laundering, the “Anti-Sexual Offences Act”. In Mr Johnson’s case (the Louisiana representative who is promoting the Stop the Sexualization of Children Bill), the definition of children is left vague in the title, but not what aspect of children is being dealt with or what ought to be done about that aspect of children: STOP IT! The banner politics that gets men into legislative authority doesn’t really need to carry through as a slogan to the title of the act, does it? Anyway, it’s now generally known as the Don’t say gay bill.
Stop. Anti. Don’t. Why can’t all legislation be prefixed with words like that? That way, we don’t need to read them, surely, and can just plaster the titles up on Paul Simon’s subway walls?
The US’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (wait for it: COPPA) of 1998 defined a child as being under 13 years of age, so, children got younger between 1998 and 2022 (oddly enough). Meanwhile, the Child Online Protection Act (pay attention now, especially you at the back, there, Jenkins: COPA) of 1998 did not actually, despite its title, mention children at all, but spoke of minors (it was intended to restrict access by minors to pornography, and was struck down by a judge who was unconvinced as to whether you could define pornography in terms of community standards, which is pretty much what I would have thought ought to apply to anything, if law is to be a means of governing communities). Minor, for the purposes of the act (which was never enacted), is defined as someone under 17 years of age, so, in less than a year, children managed to raise themselves up in America from being just 13 years of age to being 16 years of age (again, if I’m reading under right; the teen shooting-growth year, perhaps).
As far as I can tell, the Children’s Internet Protection Act (no, I have no idea if it is known as the CIPA), which was signed into legislation by Bill Clinton in 2000, again, does not use the word child in any context as being the intended protected group under the act. It does use the word child in conjunction with pornography to define a type of visual image, but, interestingly, is restricted in its scope only to visual imagery, and does not extend to the written word, which seems to me to be an astonishing lapse on the legislature’s part. Instead, again, they speak of minors, and whether that means children up to the age of 17 or up to the age of 18 is unclear (and, frankly, beyond the level of my interest by this stage).
“They’re young adults,” I was told (to return to what started me on this journey of discovery). “Right, young adults.” And that, combined with the word student is what these kids got referred to thereafter on my travels.
Pupil seems to be limited in the US to describing the human eye. (Or anything else’s eye, for all I know.) I’m not sure if it’s defined in the British Highway Code what the sign beware of children actually means in terms of what one has to beware of. Beware of persons aged 17 and under? What, then, of persons aged 18 and over? The implication would seem to be that the latter should rather beware of motorists, whilst the former need to be bewared of … Beworn? … Whilst the former are they of whom motorists need to beware. There, nailed it.
The long and the short of it is that the words child, student, pupil, minor, kid, boy, girl all have a certain legal definition (which even varies according to the law in question, no less) and also definitions that float in the air to be grasped at by anyone who happens to be passing, for use such as they feel fits the circumstances at hand. A man of 24 who is killed on a battlefield is just a boy. A man of 30 who declines his responsibilities, acts like a kid. A 70-year-old man can have a 65-year-old girlfriend. On gay dating websites, the word boy generally indicates a man over the age of 40 (I kid you not). A victim of statutory rape aged 17 is just a child. A girl of 12 is a young lady. Toddlers of three will soon be all grown-up. The words mean all things to all men, all women, all boys, and all girls.
I’m doing a translation right now, from French into English, on behalf of the Luxembourg Chamber of Employees, who are discussing youth experience opportunities in the field of work—it’s a text I’m not only proud to be translating but which is very well written, by people who care about young people.
They talk of élèves in connection with le parcours scolaire, as is right and proper, and of étudiants in respect of le parcours estudiantin, again, quite rightly so. By muddying the picture as to what is a school pupil and what is a college student, the English language has created a sort of cross-border imprecision that leaves the translator in a quandary: whether to go for the terminology of the encouraging educator, adopting the terms applying to older youths as a compliment to the younger ones, or to level everything off without distinction, and thus deny the precision with which the French original is crafted? Sticking to precise, and readily recognised, terms looks finicky to an American, old-fashioned to the British, and may even be embraced warmly by the French-speaking author, or rejected as incompatible with their original.
Linguistics can occasionally go hand in hand with a heavy dose of kidology.