Adulting

I've been at this long enough that many of the students I served when they were children are now grown up. Some are raising children of their own. I am still in the sandwich generation between my young adult son, my adult nieces, and my own mom. I know that many of my readers can relate.

Yesterday, my son's girlfriend, who moved to Arizona from Indiana last fall, stopped by unannounced to drop off a bouquet of flowers she had arranged for me. During her brief visit, I asked her a bunch of naggy questions: Did you get all your W-2s? What about your new tires? Do you still hear that whistling sound? Did you find your car title? Did those pants fit?

She answered every question, then smiled and said, "Don't worry, Mom. I'm on it."

And she is. She is a very competent young adult, and she's been on her own for a while. But that doesn't mean that my brain lets go of all the things. Being a mom is like being the god of a very small universe: you somehow manage to keep all the details about everyone in consideration all the time. I saw this so clearly when a bunch of moms came to Prescott to study with me in 2019. On every break, they took phone calls from husbands and children and mothers and mothers-in-law, serving as the frontal lobe for the whole family, locating socks and kepys and appointments from a half a continent away.

I know you know.

I came here to write about working with an adult student, and I will write about that work this winter, but first, I want to study the word adult and its use as a verb. While the common, slangy use of adult as a verb or adulting as a participle or gerund seems pretty recent, the earliest attestations I could find are actually over a century old, and there are more from the mid-20th century, all detailed below.

Besides its modern verbing, is adult a noun or an adjective or both? Is the the <ad> in adult an analyzable prefix? If so, what is <ult>? Is it the same as in ultimate or in ulterior? Is adult the stem of adultery or unadulterated?

Let's pull up our big-kid pants and investigate.