Why don't we refer to twins and triples as a litter?

clockwork_octopus@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 99 points –

Technically they're littermates...

25

Why not just call them a brood while your at it? It's because we're humans, and we don't like to be reminded that we're all just one worldwide catastrophe away from reverting back to savage animals.

Because then if your twin children got into a fight whilst cutting out paper star decorations you would get to say its star craft brood war.

Litter is usually reserved for animals that typically have more than one child at a time, it's normal for a dog, cat, mouse, etc. to have multiple babies at once, whereas with animals like humans, pandas, etc. it's a somewhat unusual occurrence so we call it something different

Twins and triples are words that contain information about the unusual number of children one had. Litter on the other hand is unspecific and is used to describe the group of newborn children of an animal for which it's typical to have more than one be born at the same time.

Be the change you want to see. Start calling it that and see if it catches on.

Until I had twins I didn't know they have a word for those of us born one at a time, singleton.

Now I catch myself using it in regular conversation and have to try not to. Example: "I've got twins and my bestie has twins and a singleton so we have to travel in her 7-seater van for day trips."

litter also means trash. you wouldn‘t want to be called rubbish.

Maybe we should get the siblings alone and see if they think the others are trash. Prisoner's dilemma style.

Hey, look! I found a furry!

It is used and has a negative connotation.

It only has a negative connotation because it is generally an "animal" word and humans believe themselves special and somehow above and separate from animals. It is the same with referring to someone using an object pronoun. Call someone "it" in English and see how fast they lose their shit. Like, mother fucker, you warp spacetime and have volume, you are a fucking object.

People already refer to their (differently aged) groups of children a litter. I don't think I've ever heard it used in a negative way, though

Identical twins should be called clones.

Yeah, I'm sure they want to be dehumanized like that...