Talk:grownup

I'm surprised... "grownup" conveyed a special meaning when we were kids. It was a person you could trust, a person who could answer questions, could solve problems. You could always go to a grown up when you were in trouble. When you lost your temper, were rude, uncivil, you were not a grownup. When you were finicky, inattentive, etc, you were not a grown up. Somethings just don't happen until you are a grown up...
 * That could be added, but I've also heard more or less the same usage for "adult" among adults. "Be the adult in the room!" for example, said to a room full of adults at each other's throats over some petty thing.  I would say that it's just a metaphorical attributive use of the basic meaning, and that it works for "grownup" just as well, but that "grownup" is used more commonly with adults talking to children or children talking to anybody.  Soap (talk) 18:09, 15 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I don't think that's anything to do with the meaning of the word "grown-up", but with what a grown-up (the person) means to a child. It's like how Christmas meant different things to a child, but doesn't have a separate lexical sense. Equinox ◑ 18:11, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, that sounds like just what it meant to you, as an individual, which is fine of course but it's not the job of a dictionary to cover the opinion of every speaker of a language. Definitions could quickly run into the thousands if we did. Renard Migrant (talk) 18:17, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

RFM discussion: February 2021–April 2022

 * See Talk:grown up.