The Atlantic

Doing Grown-Up Tasks, in Millennial Slang

“Reaching biological maturity” doesn’t quite capture it.
Source: Olivia Arthur / Magnum

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English words constantly evolve, not only in terms of what they mean, but they mean. They transform their parts of speech all the time without so much as a changed syllable. The adjective came to mean the part of the golf course that can be described by thisand came to mean the experiences in life that feel like the spatial relationships that these prepositions describe—life’s ups and downs. We transform proper names willy-nilly into adjectives, such as when we see a dress our friend Jessica would love and describe it as “so Jessica.” But the most fascinating method of linguistic conversion is to —an autological (self-describing) word denoting the transformation of a noun into a verb. Such a process recently occurred with the noun , which became , or, more commonly, .

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