Cutesy use of "her" in place of "she"?

January 7, 2018 6:15 PM

I'm curious about why some people use "her" instead of "she" in a cutesy, probably intentionally-playful manner. I've noticed at least three unrelated people doing this within the past year, in communication with a baby or puppy (but I don't believe it's a new thing).

I've found this hard to look up; I've mostly found references to small children making mistakes while learning about pronouns, or people asking about pronoun usage in the vein of whether "Her and me went to the store" is correct. I'm talking about cutesy baby-talk that's in direct communication with the small being in question. Examples: "Is her hungry?" "Does her want a biscuit?"

I'm sure there could be a connection to someone not having a firm grasp on pronoun usage or having learned incorrectly at some point, but that only seems to be a piece of the story since this seems intentional and for effect. This is in the US and involves unrelated Americans of ages from 30-something to 60-something, who are fluent in English. I haven't observed them making grammatical mistakes of a similar type, or misusing pronouns formally. I know the names of the small beings being referenced or communicated with: they're not named or nicknamed Her or anything that sounds like it. I didn't influence this communication in any way and haven't remarked on it. These observations come from Oregon.

What made, or may have helped make, this a thing?

posted by Carouselle to Writing & Language (19 answers total)

I've occasionally seen this used towards men too. And confirming that it is indeed not new - one of the places I saw this used towards men was in a short story by Dorothy Parker, so it's been around since at least the 1950s in that case.

And it is indeed meant it's a cutesy, intentionally-playful thing; it's sort of a baby-talk-y kind of thing.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:23 PM on January 7, 2018 [6 favorites]

No, you got it. Incorrect use of him/her is a feature of toddler speech, so people use it to be cute when talking to someone who is toddler-age or younger. Same way you’d ask a little kid if they had a “boo boo,” even though you obviously have a more mature way to phrase that question. It’s a way of talking down to their level.
posted by whitewall at 6:25 PM on January 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

I used to call one of my cats “hims” when he was younger, often with other baby-talk grammar (“Hims is a hunger kitty!”) This was in the early 90s in North Carolina, and as far as I know I didn’t pick it up from anywhere. So yeah, it’s probably a general baby talk thing.
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:28 PM on January 7, 2018 [6 favorites]

I have done this to my cats, who decidedly won’t absorb any linguistic miseducation from it. “Him is a good boy! Yes him is!” I suspect there’s little risk to infants of same, because the adults will subconsciously modify their syntax as the kid gets older. Won’t them? Aww, yes them will!

I’m no expert, but I have to figure (for good or ill) that it’s simply another facet of baby-talk as a dialect. We see cute small things and we have some instinct telling us to make ourselves seem harmless and amusing and less-sophisticated, so we automatically switch gears into “burble mode.”
posted by armeowda at 6:29 PM on January 7, 2018 [8 favorites]

Yeah it's just meant to sound cute. I say "look at he!" and "I love he!" when talking about my cat.
posted by capricorn at 6:38 PM on January 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

My grandmother (from the south) used to talk this way to babies too.
posted by thatone at 7:12 PM on January 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Also made an appearance on Broadway in "The Pajama Game" (1954), in a song called "Her Is."
posted by underthehat at 7:37 PM on January 7, 2018 [4 favorites]

Definitely a cutesy baby-talk thing. Both my wife and her mother use it when talking to their pets. "Oh, her's such a big girl yes she is!" "Uh oh! Him wants a treat!"

It's... adorable.
posted by The Deej at 8:12 PM on January 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Seemingly grammatically similar phrase I just saw used in answer to another question (and that I say myself): "Them's the breaks."
posted by limeonaire at 8:16 PM on January 7, 2018

Definitely emulates toddler/baby talk, but I'll make a stab at why this form of immature talk specifically sounds so cutesy. Replacing he or she with him or her replaces a subject with an object. The agency of the (kitty, baby, etc.) seems kind of affectionately mocked in the very grammar of the sentence. "Him" or "her" never does something; "he" or "she" does things. Things are done to her or him. Saying "her" or "him" did something implicitly/unconsciously makes the subject of the sentence seem even smaller/less potentially able to exert their will on the world. It's kind of like saying "What a BIG girl you are!" to a very little girl, and not in a way that makes her seem big.
posted by flourpot at 8:54 PM on January 7, 2018 [8 favorites]

When Dorothy Parker used this mode it was to mock a certain type of woman.
Damon Runyon (a big inspiration to Dorothy Parker) used it to define a type of man.
The characters they were writing were uneducated but loveable-ish people.
posted by mdrew at 9:39 PM on January 7, 2018

My mother (again, another Southerner) talks this way sometimes too when she refers to really young children.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 2:11 AM on January 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

My mother (again, another Southerner) talks this way sometimes too when she refers to really young children.

Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner: "Her and the car and mobile home are gone" - released 1972. I'm a Brit who always thought it was a Southern US manner of expression on the basis of this song.
posted by rongorongo at 4:26 AM on January 8, 2018

Sounds like standard baby-talk to me. Usually done toward infants, small children, or pets. Or by really irritating older women toward anyone... and very rarely, by condescending men toward females. (Data point: born-and-raised Oregonian)
posted by stormyteal at 4:29 AM on January 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's standard baby-talk and it grows out of pronoun misuse by children, who are just figuring out how language works. Other people refer to the child as "her," so she's going to do the same. (In my own case, I called myself "you," because that's what other people called me. "Do you want this?" "Yeah, you want this.") So the adult version is echoing the child version.
posted by dlugoczaj at 7:05 AM on January 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner: "Her and the car and mobile home are gone" - released 1972. I'm a Brit who always thought it was a Southern US manner of expression on the basis of this song.

I think this is different. There's a lot of variation and inconsistency in informal US English when it comes to pronouns that are and-ed together with other words: "Eli and I went to the movies" vs "me and Eli went to the movies," "he and his wife are going" vs "him and his wife are going," etc. But outside of babytalk, even the people who say "him and his wife are going" wouldn't say "him is going."

So yeah, no, what's unusual in the OP's examples isn't that they put "her" in subject position, it's that they put "her" alone in subject position.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:46 AM on January 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

Nthing that it's a cutesy baby talk thing. Some adults find it irresistible to speak to small children or cute pets in this manner, and don't even always realize when they're doing it.

I find it really annoying when directed at small humans -- it encourages kids to not use the correct grammar, and it's kind of gross and condescending. (Hell, I remember being a very small child and perceiving it as gross and condescending.) I am less judgmental about using some baby talk with pets -- it may be annoying sometimes, but there's no question that it's purely meaningless amusement for the human.
posted by desuetude at 9:55 AM on January 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

I do this to my boyfriend all the time. And him never says stop doing that, does him! No, 'cause is big maaaans! Oh, such a bigstrong, oh my goooodness!

(No court would convict him.)
posted by Don Pepino at 1:06 PM on January 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Ok, so clearly no different than all the random fanciful ways I speak to critters--this just doesn't happen to be one of them. Example from today: "Oh look, we found a cars!" (We saw a single car.)
posted by Carouselle at 7:08 PM on January 8, 2018 [3 favorites]