Youth (pronounced yooth)
(1) The
state (imprecisely defined) of being young.
(2) The
appearance, freshness, vigor, spirit etc, characteristic of one who is young
(usually as youthful or youthfulness).
(3) The
time of being young; early life (figuratively applied also to institutions,
ideas, movements etc to describe the first or early period.)
(4) The
period of life from puberty to the attainment of full growth (nominal
adulthood), sometimes used as a (vague) synonym for adolescence.
(5) Young
persons, collectively.
(6) A young
person, by convention usually male (which some etymologists suggest is the only
correct use).
(7) As
a locality name, the Isle of Youth (Isla
de la Juventud in the Spanish and formerly the Isle of Pines), an island in
the Caribbean, a municipality in southern Cuba.
Pre 900:
From the Middle English youthe, youghte
& ȝouþe, from
the Old English geoguth or ġeoguþ (the state of being young; young people, junior
warriors; young of cattle (and related to geong (young)), from the
Proto-West Germanic juwunþa, from the Proto-Germanic jugunþō & jugunþiz (youth) and related to the Old Saxon juguth,
the Old Frisian jogethe, the Middle
Dutch joghet, the Old High German iugund, the Gothic junda
and the Latin juventus. It was cognate with the Saterland Frisian Juugd, the Gothic junda,
the German Low German Jöögd, the West
Frisian jeugd, the Dutch jeugd and the German Jugend.
The ultimate source of the Germanic forms was a suffixed form of the
primitive Indo-European root yeu- (vital
force, youthful vigor) + the Proto-Germanic abstract noun suffix –itho. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED),
the Proto-Germanic form apparently was altered from juwunthiz by the influence of its contrast dugunthiz (ability (source of the Old English duguð)). In Middle English,
the medial “g” became a yogh (a Middle English letter (ȝ) used mainly where modern English has gh and y), which
then disappeared. The alternative forms yought & youthe are obsolete. The
Middle English youthhede (youthhood, the synonyms being yonghede, yongthe & youthe) was an example of an early nuancing as it described the part of
life which followed childhood and is thus the equivalent of the modern
adolescence although it’s clear it was also used of youth generally. Youth, youthism & youthfulness are nouns,
youthy is a noun & adjective (both obsolete), youthwards is an adverb and
youthful & youthless are adjectives; the noun plural is youths
(collectively as youth).
Synonyms
are easy to list but harder to use like youth, the meanings tend to be loaded,
some working in some contexts but not others and the list includes: juvenility,
youngness & youngth (both archaic), youthfulness, immaturity, minority, adolescence,
child, childish, kid, lad, teen, teen-ager, youngster, young minority, immaturity & stripling. The classic antonym is adulthood but in some
contexts old-age, senility and dotage (the one favoured by Kim Jong-un (Kim
III, b 1982; Supreme Leader of DPRK (North Korea) since 2011) to disparage Donald
Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) before they fell in love) may be applied.
Lindsay Lohan as an 11 year old youth and at a youthful 36.
The
adjective youthful dates from the 1560s and much earlier, Old English had geoguðlic and other words formerly used
in the same sense were youthlike, youthly, youthsome & youthy. Yippie was first reported in 1968 and was the
“marketing” name of the (not wholly fictitious) "Youth International Party"
(modelled on the then commonly used “hippie”), “founded” by counter culturalists
Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989), Jerry Rubin (1938–1994), Nancy Kurshan (b 1944)
& Paul Krassner (1932–2019). Youth
can be a modifier (youth culture, youth crime, youth worker, youth hostel,
youth market, youth justice et al) and be modified (middle youth, troubled
youth) while “youthism” (discrimination against the young) is the companion
term to ageism (discrimination against the old) although the former is, at law,
not an inherently “suspect category” in most systems where the appropriate
framework exists; that’s why five year olds can’t sue for the right to hold
drivers licences although if someone that youthful in somewhere like Florida or
Texas petitioned the US Supreme Court for the right to carry an AR-15, given
the composition of the bench, it’s far from certain there wouldn’t be at least
a few dissenting opinions supporting his or her right and as a piece of black
letter law, under current interpretations, it could be argued a five year old
with an AR-15 wouldn’t be any less representative of a “well-regulated militia”
than anyone else who now enjoys the right.
Ever
inventive, English has coined new derivations as required, the spread
encouraged by the emergence of social media.
A “youthemism” is a particular form of euphemism, describing the phrases
and photographs used in advertising to make older individuals feel a little
young younger; youthemisms appear in the slogans and marketing campaigns for
everything from pairs of jeans to “mid life crisis” motor cycles. Also from advertising (sometime seeking votes
as well as sales) is “youthenize” which describes making someone or something more
appealing to a younger market; as a transitive verb it can be used to mean “to
make youthful or younger; to rejuvenate”.
By obvious analogy with earthquake, “youthquake” seems first to have
appeared in Vogue magazine in 1965 and was a reference to the cultural changes
being wrought by the youthful baby boomers who were (uniquely in history) both
in a critical mass and an economic force by virtue of their unprecedented (for
youth) levels of disposable income. The
phrase “fountain of youth” is an allusion to some of the tales from antiquity
and is used to refer to any product, exercise regime or other activity which
promises to restore or prolong youthfulness.
The non-standard spelling “yoof” is a colloquialism from England which
first gained currency during the 1980s, often as “yoof kulture” and in
Thatcher-era England was a way of disparaging the behaviour and sloppy language
standards among the young. Like other
words intended to offend, there were sub-cultures which adopted yoof as a form
of group identity and solidarity, use prevalent among the then emerging “ravers”
and the “acid house” scene.
The German form jugend became notorious because during the Third Reich (1933-1945) the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth, 1926-1945 and abbreviated as HJ) was the Nazi Party organization for boys (10-18), intended to instil a sense of nationalism, prevent any from drifting towards delinquency and, more controversially, prepare them for military training proper. The Bund Deutscher Mädel (Band of German Maidens) was the girls' wing of the Hitlerjugend and, abbreviated as BDM, its purpose was to prepare girls for their traditional role of motherhood. Perhaps unfortunately, some mixed activities such as the HJ and the BDM going on camps together resulted in much practical preparation for motherhood, revelations of this promiscuity leading Germans to conclude BDM might be better understood as Bund Deutscher Matratzen (Band of German Mattresses).
The
word youth has long been applied to the young of both sexes (and now of all
genders) but there was (especially among classists) an argument that while
anyone could be youthful or possess the quality of youthfulness, only a young
male could be described as a youth. That
was skating on etymologically thin ice although it does seem likely the view
did reflect the conventions of use in earlier centuries and that was another
example of the reverence for antiquity which so flourished in the post
medieval-period. Those who translated
the myths from Rome and Greece of course wrote often of the beautiful boys and
young men who litter the tales but the girls and women were never youths; they were
nymphs, waifs, pixies, sprites, fairies or naiads and this tradition infected academia,
more than one professor insisting a youth could be only male.
But now
it’s used of anyone young though context still matters. In clinical medicine for example there are
two distinct fields: paediatric medicine and adolescent medicine, puberty the
point of delineation. As a technical distinction
in hospitals that’s uncontroversial but other words within the rubric of
youthfulness can carry baggage, juvenile for example being innocuous when used
in zoology to describe the young of a species but potentially incendiary when
applied to people, such remains the influence of the phrase “juvenile
delinquency”, popular since the 1960s whenever there’s a need to create a moral
panic about the behaviour of youth (complaints about which by older generations
have been documented since Antiquity). Adolescent
too has suffered because of phrases like “adolescent humor”, “adolescent behavior”
etc which rarely suggest anything positive.
Then of course there is teen-age which true pedants will always distinguish from teenage (pronounced teen-ige) which is a technical herm of fence-builders to describe a technique of weaving which interleaves brushwood to produce a type of fencing called wattle, the weave effected usually horizontally around vertical uprights planted in the ground. The use to refer to those aged 13-19 dates from 1911 and was used originally of Sunday school classes with the adjective teen-aged first noted 1922 although it wasn’t until the 1950s that an identifiable “teen-age culture” could be said to exist, something of which many (then and now) disapproved but modern capitalism, generally neutral on low-intensity cultural squabbles, identified a new market and in music, clothing, film and just about every aspect of pop-culture, teens have since been a valuable segment, spending either other people’s money (OPM) or their own. Being teen-aged of course stops with one’s 20th birthday but youth for some time persists although there’s no general agreement for how long. A helpful guide though may be the criterion enforced by New Zealand-based tour operator Contiki Tours, long renowned for their innovative model of alcohol-fueled packaged tourism for amorous youth although it seems they now also cater for those who drink rather less enthusiastically than the average Antipodean. Contiki restrict their tours to those aged 18-35, presumably because at 18 sex is lawful in all countries visited and 35 is the upper limit at which it's (in some cases) plausible for men to hook-up with 18 year old women. The days when a 21st birthday was of legal significance have gone but there’s a wide range of ages which (somewhat arbitrarily) are used to at least imply a suggestion of adulthood including matters of sexuality activity (generally 14-18 depending on jurisdiction), obtaining a drivers licence (14-23), voting (15-20), consuming alcohol (5 (with parental supervision) –20), being responsible for criminal acts (8-14) or becoming President of the United States (35). Lindsay Lohan, having thus attained the statutory age of political adulthood on 2 July 2021, may now seek to become POTUS; that would MAGA.
A montage of images of a teen-aged Lindsay Lohan.
Legal
rights and responsibilities however really don’t define the end of youth because
it’s a cultural construct and probably most would accept 25 or even 29 as the
end although of course many even beyond this can remain “youthful” and the
distinction between someone thought a “youth” or a “young adult” is likely more
a judgment of the individual than anything much to do with their age and in casual
use, youth, inherently a relative term, can also be applied to the middle aged. When it was noticed during the first
Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) that certain defendants were being influenced
during the communal lunches by the most recalcitrant of the Nazis, it was
decided to serve the meals to a number of separate tables and the one allocated
to Walther Funk (1890–1960; Nazi economics minister & central bank president) (then aged 56), Hans Fritzsche (1900–1953; Nazi propagandist) (46), Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) (41) & Baldur von Schirach (1907-1974; head of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) 1931-1940 and Gauleiter (district party leader) & Reichsstatthalter (Governor) of Vienna (1940-1945) (38) was referred to by jailers and prisoners alike as der Tischjugend (the youth table), the
average age of the diners at the other tables much older. The troublemaker who was the reason the
seating plans were changed was Hermann Göring (1893–1946; leading Nazi 1922-1945, Hitler's designated successor & Reichsmarschall 1940-1945) (52) who was put in a room to eat
alone which he did, most unhappy at being denied his audience.
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