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Post by terentiusfaber on Sept 11, 2024 22:03:53 GMT
"Older person" is vague, but I still find it peculiar that you would call yourself that. Not young =/= old or "older" in my book! I was being a little tongue-in-cheek but to a 15- or 18-year-old, say, I may be an "older" person. It's not only technically true ("older" is a comparative term and I'm older than them) but true to a considerable extent (unlike, say, someone who was one or two years older). In real terms you're still young and will be for quite a while, but to teens you're ancient. I'm still only middle-aged, but senectitude is only round the corner. |
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Post by Pacifica on Sept 11, 2024 22:13:19 GMT
Youth is subjective and it's hard to tell where it ends. And different people have different ideas about it. To my mind, 35 is a little too old to be called young, but much too young to be called old. So... maybe it's the very beginning of middle age? Or maybe it's still youth, but the very end of it then.
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Post by terentiusfaber on Sept 11, 2024 22:21:28 GMT
When I was thirty-five, I reasoned that I was likely at least half-way to the grave, so I stopped considering myself as young. Having lived through that - and quite a bit more - I see that I was still young into my early forties. We live longer and healthier lives now as well, as a rule. That has to be factored in. What does @etaoin think?
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Sept 12, 2024 3:49:21 GMT
My definition of youth varies depending on the context. If someone dies at 35, I would definitely say they died young, but if I was telling someone about my day that involved some guy I'd never seen and he was 35, I wouldn't refer to him as a young guy.
As I may have said somewhere, I tend to see 40 as the beginning of middle age, but 35 works too. Or maybe "not young but not quite middle aged yet", but it seems like splitting hairs.
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Post by Etaoin Shrdlu on Sept 12, 2024 7:43:14 GMT
Like Terry, it has always seemed logical to me that 35 should be regarded as middle-aged, if we're taking threescore and ten as the allotted lifespan, and 40 if we're going by the average lifespan in the UK. But averages are averages, and strictly speaking, you can't know when you're middle-aged. Even the youngest of us might turn out to have been middle-aged quite some time ago, if they're hit by a meteor tomorrow. How's that for a cheering thought?
There's a scene in an American sitcom from my childhood (so very long ago) where a 60-year-old man refers to himself as middle-aged, and someone asks him if he plans to live to 120. Incidentally, if you point out to someone who is 33 and a few months that they have been on this earth for a third of a century, they never seem very happy about it.
I regularly have to ask people to estimate the age of strangers. If I'm talking to someone in their late teens or early 20s, I often get answers such as 'he's quite old, maybe 40 or so'.
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Post by Pacifica on Sept 12, 2024 8:35:09 GMT
My definition of youth varies depending on the context. If someone dies at 35, I would definitely say they died young, but if I was telling someone about my day that involved some guy I'd never seen and he was 35, I wouldn't refer to him as a young guy. Same here. But death is a special case. Youth lasts long if you take youth to be any age that seems too soon to die. |
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Post by Pacifica on Sept 12, 2024 8:37:25 GMT
In other words, I don't necessarily take "he died young" to mean he was young in absolute terms when he died. It can just be "he died when he was too young to die".
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Post by Pacifica on Sept 12, 2024 8:40:58 GMT
Then again, maybe that's not 100% true. If someone died at 60, for example, that's too young to die by modern standards, but I'm not sure I would say that person died young, at least not without qualification of some sort.
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Post by Etaoin Shrdlu on Sept 12, 2024 9:15:51 GMT
What people say, and which irrationally irritates me, is people will say things like 'he was 60, that's no age'. I have to exercise the self-control that comes so hard to me to resist saying that of course it is an age, because everything is an age. See also the expression (not heard that often now) 'a woman of a certain age'. Actually, I've never known exactly what that means; to me it sounds like 'she's old, but I can't say that'. Looking at what the internet says about the phrase, it signifies different things to different people.
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Post by Pacifica on Sept 12, 2024 10:35:52 GMT
That statement of yours is no truer than theirs.  |
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Post by Etaoin Shrdlu on Sept 12, 2024 10:45:12 GMT
What do you mean?
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Sept 12, 2024 11:37:14 GMT
Then again, maybe that's not 100% true. If someone died at 60, for example, that's too young to die by modern standards, but I'm not sure I would say that person died young, at least not without qualification of some sort. I had added a caveat just about that actually: yes, saying of someone who died at 35 that they "died young" might have something to do with the fact that they were "too young to die", but then I thought that I wouldn't say that if that person was 50, even though 50 is nowhere near the average lifespan, so I deleted the caveat. Ultimately, youth is relative; you just grow a little less young as time passes, but maybe you could say you're young until you die. Probably that not "everything" is an age. |
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Post by Pacifica on Sept 12, 2024 13:19:14 GMT
Probably that not "everything" is an age. Yes. When people say "that's no age" they really mean "that's no age to die", but their words taken literally produce an untrue meaning, viz. "that's not an age at all (it's some other thing)". Similarly, Etaoin said "everything is an age" meaning "every age is an age", but her words taken literally also produce an untrue meaning, viz. "everything in the world—including my computer, the sun, the moon, the stars—is an age." |
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Post by Pacifica on Sept 12, 2024 13:26:19 GMT
'a woman of a certain age' We have that in French too, by the way: une femme d'un certain âge. It means to me pretty much what it means to you: she's old or at least well into middle age, but let's put it more kindly. |
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kizolk
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Post by kizolk on Sept 12, 2024 16:06:53 GMT
Not sure I'd ever seen the English version, but I tend to interpret the French expression as a polite euphemism for "old", if not "very old". But then you'd have to define "very old" too. For me I guess it would be 80+.
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