twixters and tweeners

[Benjamin Zimmer]

_Time_'s cover story this week features a purportedly new coinage:
"twixters"...

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http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050124/story.html
Grow Up? Not So Fast
Meet the twixters. They're not kids anymore, but they're not adults
either. why a new breed of young people won't — or can't? — settle down
[...]
The years from 18 until 25 and even beyond have become a distinct and
separate life stage, a strange, transitional never-never land between
adolescence and adulthood in which people stall for a few extra years,
putting off the iron cage of adult responsibility that constantly
threatens to crash down on them. They're betwixt and between. You could
call them twixters.
[...]
The sociologists, psychologists, economists and others who study this age
group have many names for this new phase of life — "youthhood,"
"adultescence" — and they call people in their 20s "kidults" and
"boomerang kids," none of which have quite stuck. Terri Apter, a
psychologist at the University of Cambridge in England and the author of
The Myth of Maturity, calls them "thresholders."
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Though the article doesn't say so, _Time_ seems to have modeled its
post-teen label "twixter" after the pre-teen label "tweener". (The forms
"tween" and "tweenager" date back to the '40s -- see cites in OED3 and the
ADS-L archive -- but "tweener" is favored in the media these days.)

In two Newspaperarchive cites from 1955, "twixter" is apparently used as
an equivalent to "tween(ager)":

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Chronicle Telegram (Elyria, Ohio) May 5, 1955, p. 26/1
"In Tune With Tots, Twixters and Teens" was the keynote of the North
District Spring Conference of the Ohio Child Conservation League
yesterday.
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Newport Daily News (R.I.), Oct 26, 1955, p. 5 (advt.)
If you wear a size 7 to 14, 8 to 14, or a highschooler size 10 to 16, shop
in exclusive privacy for the nicest "up-to-the-minute" fashion in our new
Jr. Deb Shop. [...]
Black watch Milliken Skirts that are washable... Sizes 10-16 and twixter
sizes 8-14.
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But in this 1959 cite, "twixter" is simply synonymous with "teenager":

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Newport Daily News (R.I.) Feb 4, 1959, p. 7/1
HOLLYWOOD (AP) -- How did teen-agers take over the popular music field?
There can be no doubt that they did. The best-selling records in the
nation are those favored by that age group called "'Twixt Twelve and
Twenty" by Pat Boone in his best-selling book. These twixters call the
tune, and the adults grudgingly follow.
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Another sense of "tweener" (usually capitalized) refers to those born
between the Baby Boom and Generation X -- a sense evidently popularized by
a 1996 _USA Today_ article: <http://www.tweeners.org/usatoday.htm>.

Not surprisingly, "Twixter" has also been suggested as an alternative to
this sense of "Tweener":

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Subject: Re: A new adult is among us!
Date: 1998/02/19
Message-ID: <34ed1883.1915966 at news.primenet.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc

>>Generations usually span two decades.
>>To repeat:
>>1945-1964 Baby Boomers
>>1964-1984 Gen X
>>
>>Trust me on this! :)
>
>Ummmm - sorry, but I am definitiely *not* a GenX person.  I was born 2
>days into 1965, and I think that you can probably carve out the expanse
>of about 3 years on either side (1962-1968) as being those too young to
>be boomers, but to old to be classified as X'ers.  "Tweeners".

Bill Johnson is right!

I coined my own phrase for it in a column once: "Twixters." I rejected
"Tweeners" because it sounded too much like "weiners." I also rejected
both GenX and the boomers because I neither slacked nor yupped.
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--Ben Zimmer