Be me 10 years old
I thought “adultery” meant acting like an adult.
I accidentally found the worst way to experiment with this new word in my vocabulary.
My mom mentioned that her boyfriend wouldn’t be spending the night.
In my mind I thought that means she’ll be going to bed early which is a responsible “adult” thing to do. “Adultery,” if you will.
So I responded to her something about adultery, can’t remember exactly what I said because it was 40 years ago but I did say the word "adultery "
Mom was dismayed but quickly read me & concluded I didn’t really know what that word meant.
I suspect “person of legal age” is the outlier to the word “adult”. See also the word adulterated — “to be made impure.” So adultery fits in that context.
The word husband comes from husbandry, which means the care and maintenance of livestock. Roll that one around in your head a bit. And the word bride originally meant restraint… typically in the word unbridled which means unrestrained. Meanwhile, a bride is someone who has traditionally shown restraint for close to 2 decades (not having sex).
Furthermore, girl used to just mean child and it didn’t mean a female one, you just called a group of children “girls” instead of “kids.” Makes you wonder, then, why most people would address them as “you guys”.
Funny how words change over time. No sarcasm here. Genuinely interesting.
Therefore “adult” probably means “impure.” Easy to believe because once you made it through the first 20 years of life you’re gonna have a lot of damage.
I had to look it up and find out that it has a whole different meaning then I thought lol
Yeah just occurred to me it is pretty much an old-fashioned obsolete word nowadays but it used to be criminalized to have sexual relations with someone you weren’t married to, especially if either parties are already married to someone else. And that crime was called adultery. I guess.
Reminded me:
> be me circa 8 years old
> Mom doesn’t get along with other mothers from my school
> nicknames the ones in a mean clique as “unicorns” so as to avoid labelling them with any ruder words
> in consoling her about these bullies I say something along the lines of “those unicorns need to stop being so horny!” (Can’t remember exactly)
> she gets scared that I’m being molested by these random adults but gets me to clarify immediately
Yeah, it really isn’t a word that makes sense intuitively
When I learned about the ten commandments in school, we had to draw a cartoon based on one of the commandments. I made a joke based on the word adultery. I showed a guy cheating on his girlfriend with the caption “your boyfriend misunderstood the phrase don’t commit adultery”, the joke being the boyfriend is being immature by cheating and not acting like an adult. It seemed funnier when I was a kid
