Birth Order

Recently I watched the French film A Christmas Tale by director Arnaud Desplechin with actresses Catherine Deneuve and her real-life daughter Chiara Mastroianni. The film did not make a big impression on me, but one word in it seized my attention: cadet.

They made reference to the birth order of the troubled film siblings and used the word benjamin to refer to the youngest. Okay, I’ve heard that before. Ditto aîné, the oldest. But then they called the middle child the cadet. Hunh? I thought cadet was the youngest, like benjamin. I was so certain that I let it slide  till it came up a second time and sent me running to my favorite on-line dictionary/translation site: WordReference. In their French/English Forums, I discovered nuances that had I hadn’t realized existed.

Yes, aîné/e means the oldest, elder, first-born. And benjamin/e means the youngest, the baby of the family. Next, I looked up cadet and aha! There it was: the younger, the youngest, the baby of the family, a synonym for benjamin. I gave myself a pat on the back, but then I wondered what do they call the middle child in French? Back to the dico. No specific word appeared and I figured they must use an adjective the way we do in English, like au mileu de famille or some such construction. But then I scrolled to the bottom of the page and there in the Forums was an entry for middle child. And Voila – a discussion on the topic of how to translate ‘middle child’.

And I learned that cadet is the second child (also called puîné) and if it’s a two child family it’s also the youngest child, or the benjamin. But if there are more than two children, cadet can refer to any other child except the oldest. And to make matters more confusing, benjamin can also refer to the favorite child, in which case it could refer to any of the children. Are you confused yet?

Let’s examine some examples:

Tommy is the oldest, the aîné. Dick is the younger and assuming there aren’t any less famous siblings he’s also the youngest, so he is the cadet. According to Tommy, Mom always liked Dick the best, so Dick is the benjamin by virtue of being the favorite and the youngest.

The Simpsons

Bart is the oldest, so he is the aîné. Maggie is the youngest, so she is the benjamin. Lisa is the middle child, so she is the cadet. But I haven’t watched enough of The Simpsons to know which is the favorite child.