the.com/teenager
a finished body piloted by an unfinished brain, doing 90 in a parking lot of feelings
means A person between roughly thirteen and nineteen years old, in the stretch of life between childhood and adulthood.
from A surprisingly young word for a young age: "teen" comes from the Old English suffix -tyne, the same root that gives us the numbers thirteen through nineteen — literally "ten and three," "ten and four," and so on. But the noun "teenager" itself only arrived in the 20th century, an American coinage that gained traction in the 1940s as marketers and magazines suddenly noticed there was a whole stage of life — and a whole spending demographic — sitting between child and grown-up that nobody had bothered to name.
- new word
- Coined in the 1940s by marketers, not scientists
- brain build
- Prefrontal cortex won't finish until age 25
- sleep math
- Their body clock biologically shifts hours later
- risk wiring
- Reward centers peak years before judgment catches up
- global rarity
- The concept barely exists in many cultures
romeo and juliet — shakespeare's tragedy featuring 13-year-old juliet and teen romeo, written 1594-1596
malala yousafzai — nobel peace prize winner shot by taliban at age 15 in swat valley, pakistan, 2012
greta thunberg — swedish climate activist who started school strikes at age 15 in 2018