this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Ah yes. Twelveteen.
To be fair, the actual article text was "adolescents", and someone can be going through puberty at twelve, so the body text is correct. Might have been that a different party writes the headline, and considered it to be a mechanical shortening, as the terms are generally used kinda interchangably.
Good catch, though.
Tbh in some languages like mine the concept of preteen does not exist since all the numbers between 10 and 20 have the 'teen' suffix so 11 year olds are teens here.
This reminds me of something. Just before my 20th birthday, a Venezuelan friend and I had a little discussion about the concept of "teenagers." I had lamented that my teen years were about to be over, since I was tying the word to numbers that ended in -teen. However, his idea of "teenager" was "adolescent" (Spanish adolescente) which wouldn't apply to a 19 year old.
The Spanish language doesn't have an equivalent "-teen" suffix. The closest term is "diez y ..." (ten and ...) which describes numbers from 16 (diez y seis) to 19 (diez y nueve). Adolescence for most people starts before age 16, so tying the concept to the "diez y ..." ages doesn't make sense.
In other words, despite every translator and teacher saying so, teenager ≠ adolescente. They each approximate the same life stage, and can at times refer to the same ages, but "teens" are a specific concept based on the English-language number system. It's just one of those linguistic quirks to look out for.
Welcome to the world of translation where there is seldom a 1 to 1 translation. You often have to use something close but not correct or several words. It's tough to decide which is better in a situation.
“All translation is a compromise – the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.”
— Benjamin Jowett
Funnily enough, the concept works in german: Zehn, Elf, Zwölf, Dreizehn for ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen
Well, they're both Germanic languages so not terribly surprising, I'd assume?
I wonder if Only fans is still an option for teens as old as 38?
"Join now, and I'll take my shirt off to show you my impression of a wet marshmallow rolled in hair..."
we have a 50+year teen on ketamine in the wild.
Tweens is the term.