We often say…
There was a baby boy
The purpose is I want the listener to understand that I saw a baby who was of male gender.
But I want to convey the same thing looking at a kid (say 5-8 yr old)
There was a kid boy (hurling stones at a cute puppy)
If the former is okay, the latter should be but still, to my non-native ears, it sounds off.
Also, baby boy is okay as baby serves as an adjective, why is not kid okay as in kid brother? I understand that the whole word is considered as a noun but then kid is more like an adjective there.
[Please note that I want to restrict the word to 'kid' over 'young boy' or the like just to avoid that someone should not take him as an adolescent or a teenager. I'm not getting into who do we refer to as a kid. There's no one answer to that].
The main question is -is it okay to address him that way? If not, what you natives prefer?
Best Answer
My gut feeling aligns with yours – it sounds off to me. I did some research on Google that seems to confirm our hunches.
One reason it sounds off, I think, is because kid and boy both connote a young age. So, the phrase sounds redundant. You could simply say:
or:
I suppose one could argue that a "boy" could be an adoloscent, so, some clarification about age might be in order. However, if you wanted to clarify, you could say:
Ngrams found plenty of hits for "a young boy" and "a young girl," but came back empty-handed for "a kid boy" and "a kid girl".
I found several hits on Google for "a kid boy", but they were excellent examples of why hit counts need to be examined carefully. Many of them had extra punctuation, like this:
Some even used the word boy as an exclamation, like this Pinterest tag:
There were several hits that were labels to stock illustrations:
but redundancy makes sense in that context, because those who title images in an image database want customers to get hits if they search for boy or search for kid.
But I'd avoid it in a context like the one you are asking about.