S. Worthen | Weblog

clarification: i think dolls and teddies are the same thing but non-overlapping categories.

M thinks they are non-overlapping categories and it's "teddy bear" not "teddy".

Look up 'teddy' - if I hear the words 'stuffed teddy' I have an interesting picture involving underwear. 'Teddy bear' stops any such thoughts dead.

Dolls and Teddy Bears are different categories to me, probably because I hated dolls as a kid but loved my stuffed toys.

Teddies represent animals, usually anthropomorphic, and have to be made of soft materials. Dolls represent humans and humanoids, and can be made of hard or soft materials.

I could conceive of a hybrid: it would have to be soft (to fit the teddy criteria) and represent an alien or mythological creature that had both human and non-human characteristics, but I'm not sure I've ever seen such a thing.

I could see the argument for e.g. a My Little Pony being a doll, because it's sort of in the same category of things, and clearly not a teddy because not soft, but I wouldn't refer to it in that way.

I don't know why "stuffed animals" (the parent category of teddy bears) aren't dolls, but they're not.

This is not to say that you can't have a doll of a cat, but it's a different sort of thing. Or at least, I can conceive of its existence? But it'd have to be a pretty strange thing. (Or an accessory for a pre-determined doll.)

Man, I feel like the jurists who decided that X-Men figurines were not dolls but action figures (and did not depict humans).

Heh, linguistics is fun.

Dolls are a genre and teddy bears, along with other stuffed animals, are types of dolls. A baby doll is a doll that resembles a human baby or child.