Grammar pedants - help please.

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westmoors Oct 2024 7:16am, 11 Oct 2024 9,173 posts	0 westmoors Unless they meant still born.
um Oct 2024 8:41am, 11 Oct 2024 8,936 posts	0 um Or they really meant it, an emergency caesarian after the mother passed away? Good luck finding a way to ask and find out!
Drell Oct 2024 11:21am, 11 Oct 2024 2,636 posts	0 Drell Or they meant after the father's death. I've heard of someone being a "posthumous child" meaning just that.
ChrisHB Oct 2024 2:55pm, 11 Oct 2024 23,240 posts	0 ChrisHB I should have said the mother and child were both alive years after. Not sure about the father.
um Oct 2024 3:02pm, 11 Oct 2024 8,939 posts	0 um As per Drell, the dictionary definition is 'born after the death of a parent' and includes babies born using stored father's sperm. There's a whole swathe of stuff (on the web that covers putting the father's name on the birth certificate even if dead before impregnation!
Charlesvdw Oct 2024 7:19pm, 11 Oct 2024 414 posts	0 Charlesvdw We all know what prematurely means. But when the birth is a few days or a week later than expected it can be called postmaturely.
Columba Oct 2024 9:26pm, 12 Oct 2024 22,591 posts	0 Columba Surely a posthumous birth is one which occurs after the baby's father has died? - I'm sure it's in one of Dickens's novels: "I was a posthumous baby" - but I can't remember which one. I mean, which novel.
Columba Oct 2024 9:32pm, 12 Oct 2024 22,593 posts	0 Columba Probably Great Expectations.
um Oct 2024 6:57am, 13 Oct 2024 8,944 posts	0 um Sometimes Google is quite useful! I was a posthumous child. My father’s eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. There is something strange to me, even now, in the reflection that he never saw me; and something stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance that I have of my first childish association with his white grave-stone in the churchyard, and the indefinable compassion I used to feel for it lying alone there in the dark night, when our little parlour was warm and bright with fire and candle, and the doors of our house were —almost cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes—bolted and locked against it. From “David Copperfield,” by Charles Dickens
RichHL Oct 2024 3:17pm, 13 Oct 2024 23,365 posts	0 RichHL There was a motoring writer called Cyril Posthumus. I think Posthumus was also an Ancient Roman cognomen.