I have to say...
It annoys and disgusts me like nothing else in the world when people use the verb 'to breed' with reference to humans. I know that I'm only a few thousand generations removed from Bobo who threw his faeces at me at the zoo the other day, but I can't stomach the voluntary reproduction of a sapient species being referred to with a word that evokes imagery of a den orgy involving one of the smaller mustelid species.
Come on. We're the species that came up with change-ringing, karaoke, critical pedagogy, the Holocaust, Pride and Prejudice, the pudding cup, and morris dancing! Hell, we shouldn't even use 'to breed' with the higher apes, elephants, or cetaceans! 'To have children' is fine, 'to bring forth' is fine. 'To breed' makes human reproduction sound like something from a bad horror movie and it makes the person using it sound like either a particularly nasty sort of biologist or one of those Voluntary Human Extinction freaks.
For fuck's sake. Even 'to beget' is preferable.
Come on. We're the species that came up with change-ringing, karaoke, critical pedagogy, the Holocaust, Pride and Prejudice, the pudding cup, and morris dancing! Hell, we shouldn't even use 'to breed' with the higher apes, elephants, or cetaceans! 'To have children' is fine, 'to bring forth' is fine. 'To breed' makes human reproduction sound like something from a bad horror movie and it makes the person using it sound like either a particularly nasty sort of biologist or one of those Voluntary Human Extinction freaks.
For fuck's sake. Even 'to beget' is preferable.