twixters and tweeners

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:06 AM -0500 1/18/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>_Time_'s cover story this week features a purportedly new coinage:
>"twixters"...
>
>----------
>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" —...

Plus ça change--the word "adult" is itself originally from the past
participle (_adultus_) of the verb _adolescere_, the idea being that
once one has finished growing up--adolesced--one is a grown-up.  And
of course _adolescent_ is the present participle of the same verb.
So adultescence is a blend of two lexical items that were originally
inflectional variants of the same lexical item.  There may be a word
for this, but if so I don't know it.  (auto-doublet?)

larry