The ADS has the oldest WOTY vote, and recent picks have include such major words of our time as “subprime,” “truthiness,” and “weapons of mass destruction” — plus a few neato obscurities like “Plutoed” — 2006’s WOTY, which means being demoted to non-relevant status, á la the coldest, snubbedest, in-the-doghouse-iest former planet of them all.

A candidate for 2008 WOTY might be “kindergarchy” — defined by Paul McFedries on The Word Spy as “Rule or domination by children; the belief that children’s needs and preferences take precedence over those of their parents or other adults.” This new word has spread quickly, concisely capturing the feeling that the lollipops of childhood have been replaced by royal sceptres, with which parents and bystanders are soundly bludgeoned.

In the June 21, 2008, edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, Michael Duffy sums up the feelings behind the word: “Ours is a society increasingly dominated by the needs of children, or rather by the extraordinarily inflated needs we have come to attribute to them. The amount of money and attention many parents lavish on their children not only doesn’t do much for the characters of their sons and daughters, it diminishes the parents’ lives as well.”

Linguistically, kindergarchy has cousins. Anxiety over how much parenting is too little, too much, just right, or just wrong dominates conversations between parental units everywhere, spawning many a word, including “helicopter parent” (so-named for their ominous, ever-present hovering, like an FBI chopper closing in on a perp) “hyperparenting” (related to both over-scheduling and hyperventilating), “hurried child syndrome” (one result of the helicopter and hyper models of parenthood), and “trophy child” (like a trophy wife, the child is a shiny, albeit cookie-crumb-covered, ornament meant to reflect glory on the parents).

But the kindergarchy concept has even older ancestors, which makes me think this type of parents-these-days gripe has always been around to some extent; perhaps even a few cave-parents thought their peers were spending too much time on the cave-babies and not enough on wheel-inventing and fire-discovering. The OED has citations from 1846 and 1882 for “babyolatry” and “infantolatry” respectively, while another rare word from 1850 is a primordial predecessor to kindergarchy, sharing a similar sentiment: “Your infantocracy is the most absolute government under the sun.”

In one of the articles that put this term on the map, Joseph Epstein writes, “My mother never read to me, and my father took me to no ballgames, though we did go to Golden Gloves fights a few times. When I began my modest athletic career, my parents never came to any of my games, and I should have been embarrassed had they done so. My parents never met any of my girlfriends in high school. No photographic or video record exists of my uneven progress through early life.”

Maybe I accidentally put on my cranky curmudgeon fez instead of my language-columnist cap today, but that’s a lot of sour grapes staining the purple prose of Epstein’s argument against the supposed kindergarchy. Just because some folks were raised in a barn by wolves — or received less than the suggested daily requirement of hugs and cookies — is no excuse for painting kids as kings and suggesting a regime change. Everybody gets tired of hearing about everybody else’s kids sometimes, but a world truly ruled by children would be a different planet altogether, featuring headlines such as:

Bedtime ruled a war crime.

“Dibs” recognized as legally binding; failure to respect dibs punishable by wedgie.

Spilling stuff designated as valid cultural practice that must be respected.

Now that’s kindergarchy. It’s a compelling concept — like Chocolate-cake-istan or The Planet of the Zombie Vampires — but we’re not living in it.

Are you living in a kindergarchy? Or is the very idea offensive, silly, or cuckoo? Let us know in comments.

Nicknaming comes with the royal scepter and magic slippers of world leadership — but what about household leaders? Parents need nicknames too, though my attempt at a Top Five parental nicknames produced a scrawny list, pointing in one direction. Drum roll, please:

5) breeders

As the first known use, circa 1979, indicates — “There are even those gays who are militantly nonreproductive, using the hostile term ‘breeders’ to refer to child-producing heterosexuals.” — this term started in the gay community. Not surprisingly, it’s been embraced by the child-free movement and plenty of parents use the word jokingly as well.

4) stroller —–

See my column from last month, in which the stroller set, the stroller brigade, and even the stroller mafia are discussed.

3) parentals

More in five seconds.

2) ‘rents

Hold on just a nano-jiffy.

1) parental units

We have a winner, and it wasn’t close. By far, “parental units” is the most common, solid, satisfying slang term for parents — and it’s the proud progenitor of “rents” and “parentals” too.

“Parental units” is common as mud and can be found in books, blogs, newspapers and magazines — though not many dictionaries, except for my own Yada Yada Doh: 111 TV Words That Made the Leap from the Screen to Society. The term debuted on Saturday Night Live, during the first Coneheads’ sketch, “The Coneheads at Home” (Jan. 15, 1977), when Connie Conehead said to Beldar and Prymaat, “Good morning, parental units.”

“Parental units” is typical Coneheadese; they also coined “irregular sound patterns” for music, “time coordinates” for time, and “sleep chamber” for bed. Perhaps future historians will discover that the Coneheads are responsible for other euphemistic terms, such as “trash item” (trash), “heritage act” (oldies band), “alternative interrogation methods” (torture) and “low-information voter” (clueless voter).

When non-coneheads call parents “parental units,” it implies that there’s something mechanical, absurd and inauthentic about the units in question or parenthood in general. Well, at least that was the original connotation: the term is so common today that there’s very little insult left. It’s mainly used by pen-pushers like myself, who get tired of writing “parent” over and over again.

Like any successful word, parental units has given birth itself: In Slang and Sociability, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill linguist Connie Eble mentions how “parental units” has been shortened into “parentals” and further clipped to form “‘rents.” She adds that, “A variant clipped form is rental unit, making explicit the financial dependence of students on their parents.” That’s a neato development, since Jonathan Green — in Casell’s Dictionary of Slang — suggests that the original term plays upon “rental units.” So “rental units” may be the parent and child of “parental units,” which sounds disturbing until you remember we’re just talking about words.

Other terms have fallen from the tree at a different angle: “maternal unit” and “paternal unit” are out there, plus a few others demonstrated by this blogger: “Oh. So much to be thankful for! We had a great weekend in the O.C. with the grand-parental and great-grand-parental units.” A rarer variation was coined when a writer for Elle discussed post-birth romance: “I hoped he would silently accept this new state in which we were a perfectly functioning parental eunuch team.”

“Parental eunuch” isn’t the most prosperous or spiffy member of the “parental unit” clan, but I guess even word families can have a dark sheep…

What nicknames for parents have you heard or used? Let us know in comments.

(Whoops, that’s a symbol of Norse mythology, not parenthood — my bad.)

But lately, the word that’s most often standing in for procreative-ness (while begetting many new words) is "stroller." From Babblebaby’s own Strollerderby to the sweaty joys of strollerobics and the bitter wrath of stroller rage, "stroller" is a word that seems capable of rolling into any area of the culture where parents and children roam.

Rather than attempt an exhaustive stroller-word roundup, which would only lead to missed naps and hard feelings, I’ve trained my beady eyes — er, penetrating gaze — on stroller’s use as an adjective in terms that are symptoms of many emotions and experiences. Annoyance about cramped sidewalks, demented disapproval for the continuance of the human race, and new parents’ wonder at their new place among the strollerati are just a few of the feelings that have stuck to this word like an IHOP breakfast to a toddler.

stroller Nazis
The New York Times gave a serious boost to this term in May when Lynn Harris wrote of NYC’s Park Slope neighborhood: "Its glorious brownstone blocks and jaunty cafes are awash in carpetbagger entitlement, ruled by snarling ‘Stroller Nazis.’" In a world full of grammar Nazis, soup Nazis, and even some bagel Nazis, it’s safe to say "Nazi" has been watered down to the point of meaninglessness. But even some ‘rents are compelled to use the term for their own purposes, like one mum who lived through a mega-aggressive sales-creature’s toxic storeside manner: "I don’t think I’ll shop there again. Scary Stroller Nazi." Softer synonyms include "stroller mafia" and "stroller mob" — and someday, perhaps — "stroller-stapo."

stroller people
Though "people" seems like it should be a neutral word that’s about as inflammatory as plain toast — and light years from "Nazi" — even a people person can’t help notice the word is used in many disparaging ways. Think how toxic "you people" and "those people" taste on the tongue. Likewise, "stroller people" evokes general distaste ("I appreciated not having to deal with the stroller people") or alludes to "pod people" ("Invasion of the stroller people").

stroller crowd
This sometimes carries the disparaging baggage of "stroller people," but some parents use it to describe themselves too: "Ever since joining the stroller crowd, we have become more aware of elevator access, etc." This term also seems to lend itself to hyphenated adjectives, such as "bib-and-stroller crowd," "camcorder-and-stroller crowd," "cell phone-and-stroller-crowd" and "overalls-and-stroller crowd."

stroller set
Most of these labels equate strollers with their pushers, not their passengers, but here’s an exception. As used in headlines such as "High style for the stroller set" and "Sex Ed for the Stroller Set," "stroller set" signals that grown-up subjects are encroaching on childhood like a puddle of juice on a laptop.

Even if you don’t feel like a member of the stroller mafia, chances are a non-stroller-haver somewhere is going to judge you by your wheels — and you may wish you had the power to whack them, like a nurturing Tony Soprano.

Instead, I suggest that frustrated strolleristas embrace variations of their own. Many parents already have, calling themselves "stroller fanatics," "stroller addicts," "stroller nuts," "stroller junkies," "stroller whores," "stroller snobs" and "stroller geeks."

Repeat after me: "My name is your-name-here, and I am a stroller-holic."

Where have you seen stroller used as shorthand for parents or kids? Was it used in an insulting, complimentary, or neutral way? Let us know in comments.