2014 Word of the Year: "Adulting"


(A Zillion Dollar Comics/Carolyn Hiler)

How good are you at adulting? Do you engage in boring, responsible tasks in a timely manner? Or do you watch one more episode of My Little Pony instead of washing the dishes? When you choose the latter instead of the former, you're struggling to adult.

Mignon Fogarty, the internet's Grammar Girl, is a professional writer and educator on word usage, grammar, and style. She's selected "adulting" as her personal choice for the word of the year:

I first saw adulting when my family friend Lindsey Moreno tweeted it right before school started. She was starting college as a new freshman and had had a rough day, and when I saw her write “I'm so bad at adulting,” I knew just what she meant. When she explained that she’d spent the whole day sorting out problems at the DMV and the bank, I felt her pain. Adulting is hard. […]

The other thing I’ve found about adulting is that when people hear it, they immediately understand what it means and seem to think it fills a void, and Kelly said she’s had the same experience. She says, “I think the reason it resonates is that we don't really have a specific word for that process, and it's an important one. It feels good when you're adulting.” That positive reaction, combined with adulting's popularity on social media, is why I think the word has a good chance of catching on.

-via Lawrence E. Forbes


I think this is more of a thing now than it used to be, because in the past, children grew up gradually. Now it's "no responsibilities until you are 18, then you are on your own."

For example, no bank will give my kids a checking account until they are 18. And if you happen to be three states away from home at college when you turn 18 (as I was), you are on your own. I had a checking account for years before I moved away from home, because it was long ago, and my parents helped me learn to use it.

For me, "adulting" was not so scary because I'd mastered the small things one at a time when I wasn't yet an adult, like driving, holding a job, handling money, making decisions, traveling, etc etc.
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