What do you call the child who doesn’t resemble his / her parents in English?

Question

There are sons and daughters who don’t look like their parents at all. We call them “Onikko 鬼っ子” in Japanese, which literally means the child born or brought by an ogre, not by his / her biological parents.

Onikko doesn't necessarily mean derogatory. For instance, when we have a brilliant child brought up by mediocre parents, we describe the child 鳶が鷹を産んだ子 - tobi ga taka wo unda ko - a hawk born by a kite. The hawk (child) can be a kind of Onikko.

What is the expression in English for the son or daughter who doesn't resemble his / her parent in face, figure and temper though they are their parents' real child?

Answer 1

Usually it would be polite not to mention the fact that a child doesn't seem to resemble its parents, since this might imply infidelity on the part of the mother (not good for Susan George in the 1975 film Mandingo). But you will sometimes encounter OED's sense 6a for...

sport - a plant (or part of a plant), animal, etc., which exhibits abnormal or striking variation from the parent type, esp. in form or colour; a spontaneous mutation; a new variety produced in this way.

This noun usage derives from the (now rare) verb sense...

sport (v 8a) - of nature (originally, personified): to ‘amuse herself’ or delight in producing the variety of things in existence, especially abnormal or striking living forms; to produce such forms.

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As @ronan comments, facetious "He looks like the postman / milkman / etc." is not uncommon.

There's also throwback (reversion to an earlier ancestral type or character; an example of this). But unless accompanied by a reference to a specific grandparent (or perhaps great grandparent) that the child does resemble, this invariably has negative associations (with the implicit unspecified ancestor being a Neanderthal or some other precursor to homo sapiens).

Answer 2

You could use the/an apple that fell far from the tree.

This is a play on the saying "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree", meaning that children tend to resemble their parents both physically as well as temperamentally, or even in more mundane aspects such as job choice or favourite football team.

By saying it this way, you leave it up to the listener (or to context) to decide where the difference between child and parent lies and whether the difference is a positive or negative one.

Answer 3

For the temperament side, I've seen "changeling", a reference to the medieval belief that children were sometimes stolen by fairies and replaced by imperfect magical copies. I've never heard a term for children who don't look like their parents short of technical terms such as "outlier" and, of course, the occasional term that implies that they were fathered by someone else entirely.

Answer 4

How about, "The baby was switched at the hospital." Or, as I like to say when asked why my brother and I don't look anything alike, "Our mothers were switched at the hospital."

Answer 5

While I'm not a native speaker, I'd like to offer cuckoo, or maybe cuckoo child. Cuckoos are well-known to be obligate brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds, relying on them to raise their offspring. John Wyndham uses this word in a similar sense in the title of his novel The Midwich Cuckoos.

Alternatively, taking a step back, how about the oddball of the family, or even (a bit satirically) the black sheep of the family? For example: John, descendant of a long line of parish priest, became the black sheep of the family when he became an accountant.

I believe these alternatives would not be so horribly offensive in an everyday context.

Answer 6

Later: runt of the litter

Yoichi, I finally thought of a common phrase somewhat like what you say. Well for an Onikko, not the other one. If you are the shortest sibling, schoolyard language might be "he's the runt of the litter."

This is not exactly like Onikko -- but it is one subset of Onikko!

In certain circumstances, if you were translating a minor character in a novel, you could get away with "runt of the litter" as a quick substitution.

("Runt" is simply the word for an undersized farm animal (say, a pig) or the smallest (say, pig) in a litter. When you use it for a human, it's mildly derogatory, mildly comic.)

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In my opinion, there's really nothing for this in English.

(I was fascinated to learn the Japanese terms - thanks for that!)

{By the way. This is a great concrete example of how Japanese (and many other languages) are incredibly less "politically correct" that today's English.}

One thing comes to mind:

"red-headed stepchild" is an unusual often-used derogatory term for - not so much exactly what you ask - but a child that is treated badly, or is really "excluded from" the family, let's say. (A little like, say, Cinderella in the story.) It is highly derogatory (or else, just used wildly humorously), and it is wildly offensive to both red-headed people and adoptees :) So don't use it :)

black sheep is not, really, close to what you're asking, it's more one who is well, a bad person in an otherwise straight family (or used in lighter ways, example all the other siblings get high marks in school)

Regarding the references to postman and similar. If you're wondering what the hell we're talking about...

It is a low-quality standing joke in English that if a child's father is not the mother's husband -- ie, she cheated on him -- then the father was "the postman" or "milkman". indeed, anytime you see someone who does NOT resemble their father, many people would make a low-quality joke regarding "the milkman". For example, they might snicker and whisper "Heh, the postman has been busy around here..."

(That type of humour very much makes me think of [Benny Hill(http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Hill) and the "low quality" British TV humour of the 1970ish, such as the "Carry On..." series.)

{It would be staggeringly hard to explain the "Carry On..." series to someone from Japan, if you're not familiar with it. :) }

{Example: we had a TV series in that time period called "Are you being served?" which is set in a department store. (The title is a (incredibly lame) sexual innuendo.) Now, one of the characters had a cat at home. In English you can call a cat a "pussy", and that is also a slang term for vagina. Now, almost the entire content of the show was based on "pussy" being a pun with vagina. So, the lady in question would say "my pussy was so hungry today," "my pussy really needs a wash" and so on and on and on. ... ! honestly, that was sort of 70% of the entire comic content of the show :) }

Anyway, my point is that the "postman..." reference from the snickering Lads above, was rather in that "Benny Hill" "Carry on.." sort of poor-quality British humour of the 1970s.

{Note that, confusingly, shortly after this in the UK we/they had on TV incredibly subtle, outstanding, upper-class intellectual comedy - heh! For example to the manor born {in this case the title is an exceedingly fine play on words} which contained an unending stream of absolutely amazingly subtle humour in English, eg., Audrey points to a fireplace and says "antiques, He wouldn't know it from Adam."}

Bottom line - there's no term for that in English.

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Note - Fumble brilliantly thought of throwback.

That's not a term for Onikko or tobi-ga-taka-wo-unda-ko.

But it's very often used, exclaimed, when you see or are talking about a tobi-ga-taka-wo-unda-ko.

{For example. if we did in fact use the word tobi-ga-taka-wo-unda-ko in English, you'd hear "Wow, she is such a tobi-ga-taka-wo-unda-ko - must be a throwback a few generations!"}

(Note however that Fumble asserts it's for Onikko, me, I've only ever heard it used for tobi-ga-taka-wo-unda-kos.)

Answer 7

LM Montgomery refers to a child who doesn't resemble other family members as a
hop out of kin. That's probably pretty archaic and overly idiomatic for what you're looking for, though.

Answer 8

The word you're looking for is xenogenesis, so xenogenic perhaps?

Answer 9

My wife and I have just such a child. He's blonde with grey-blue eyes, and my wife and I are both brunette and have hazel eyes, so the lack of resemblance is really obvious. But no, there really isn't any widely-known word for this. "Recessive genes" would be good explanation (and true, he gets these traits from one of my uncles).

There is however, a widely-known cultural joke for this phenomenon, and it's in one of the comments. "He comes from the milkman/mailman", said with a nudge and a wink. Using the word "milkman" specifically is especially coy, since milkmen just don't exist anymore, and haven't for some 40 or 50 years. When my wife says he comes from the mailman, I like to respond "but our mailman was a girl!" Any shocked looks get followup explanations about the recessive genes brought to our family by my uncle.

From now on though, I'm going to start calling him our Onikko. The English language is certainly not above stealing terms and grammar from other languages. ;)

It's pronounced "oh-NEEK-oh" right?

Answer 10

The word atavistic is an adjective, which means to resemble ones ancestors, and is normally used when it appears that a person doesn't resemble a parent, and often there might be a mention of a grandparent, or even beyond. The noun is atavism. It's not quite the same as the word you have in Japanese for them, or it wouldn't quite convey the same meaning, or even sound right, if you said "He is an ativism"; because it sounds too formal and it isn't as colourful.

The adverb atavistically is useful in less formal usage. You could say something like "His appearance was atavistically unlike his parents. Using the adverb here in this way would not sound impolite as it hints at a former generation, and it doesn't sound like there is a suspicion that it was the milkman. (Oh damn, I even fell into that trap too.)

Answer 11

We don't really have anything like this in English. The closest is "black sheep", which refers to someone different from the rest of the family, but usually in temperament, not appearance.

Answer 12

There really is no single word for this. You could refer to the child as being the reincarnation of someone he or she reminds you of. This would work well as a compliment. For example, a child who is a musical prodigy might be a "reincarnation of Mozart." "Switched at birth" is also commonly used, e.g. "I don't know where he gets that blond hair from; I think he must have been switched at birth." Personally, I often call my own child "demon spawn," but I think most parents would be offended if someone said that to them. This would typically be used to describe a child who is misbehaving, but also indicates that the child's behavior is not the parents' fault.

The "milkman's child" specifically refers to a child who does not resemble the father. It indicates adultery.

Just a note: the term "sport" is not used in the aforementioned way in the U.S., so consider location before you choose a phrase. A little more context might help you get a more appropriate answer. (I am new to this site, so I am not able to comment directly on the posts mentioning "sport.")