The word ‘adulting’ is gross and sexist

YOU never hear anyone say it out loud, but the unfortunate verb “adulting” is everywhere. Peculiar to social media, it’s a term that seems to be wielded most frequently by young women – and the pastel-bedecked brands wooing them – to signify the completion of quotidian grown-up tasks such as doing laundry, going to work, exercising and cooking a meal. “Every day I don’t eat canned soup is a day I win at adulting.” “I just bought my first business cards! I feel like a real adult now!” Or the meme that nearly broke me: “I’m done adulting. Let’s be mermaids.”

Yuck. I confess that as my 30s progress, I’m becoming distressingly Andy Rooney-ish (a reference the #adulting crowd might not even get), but my burgeoning crankiness isn’t why I hate the word. And I don’t hate it because it’s an example of a noun becoming a verb. I hate it because it’s a self-infantilising rejection of female maturity in a culture that already has almost no love for grown-up women. Deploying “adulting” to describe what’s otherwise known as “life” is a sure way for woman not to be seen as an adult.

According to the folks at Merriam-Webster, using the word “adulting” to mean “to do the things that adults regularly have to do” started appearing on Twitter in 2008 and 2009, but it surged in popularity in 2014, when podcaster Mignon “Grammar Girl” Fogarty named it her word of the year. Per Digiday, the term’s use really exploded last year, with at least 80 000 online mentions of the “adulting” monthly.

This is a common trajectory for new words nowadays, says Robin Lakoff, professor of linguistics emeritus at the University of Califor nia at Berkeley. Before social media, young women would invent new words and they’d eventually reach the written form. Now many words begin in writing, and then later, migrate to speech.

As Danielle Tullo delightfully rants for Cosmopolitan, women who use the term aren’t deeply impressed with themselves for doing basic adult tasks such as laundry. They know it’s not a huge achievement, and though Millennial bashers think twenty-somethings want a trophy for purchasing car insurance or managing to regularly put on clean underwear, they really don’t.

She’s right – but I’d take the argument a step further. Young women are just afraid to be public about their actual achievements because if their public persona is self-assured, they are also perceived to be less likeable. Portraying themselves as less competent in their online personas is a hedge against a societal ethos that regularly denigrates mature women. I’m not just talking about Hollywood, where a 37-yearold woman is apparently too old to play a 55-year-old man’s girlfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal, who did not name the actor).

Age discrimination begins for women in the workplace at 35, as PBS NewsHour reported last year. That’s reflected in popular culture by the popular TV show Younger in which a 40-year-old woman passes herself off as 26 to get the job she needs to make ends meet as a single mother. And you already know the kind of trashing that mature women’s expertise took in the 2016 election.

“It makes sense that women would want to hold onto their youth when everything commercial in our society says, ‘you better hold on to your youth,’” Lakoff says.

Here’s the rub. Maybe you won’t get public affirmation for being a non-ironic adult female, but it’s still great, and while I may no longer be adorable I feel in control of my life. Sometimes I even eat cold pizza for breakfast, which falls somewhere along the adulting spectrum.

• Grose is editor of the Lenny e-mail newsletter and author of the Soulmates and Sad Desk Salad.