waithood means A period of limbo faced by young college graduates in developing countries, in which activities belonging to the traditional transition into adulthood, such as marriage and buying a home, are put off to allow the securing of employment or money. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 93 out of 100.
Why this word is great
WAITHOOD — [Noun] An involuntary, protracted period of suspended biography, in which the traditional transitions to adulthood—stable work, independent residence, marriage—are indefinitely deferred by economic stagnation and precarity. Coined by scholar Diane Singerman in 2007 as a blend of 'wait' and 'adulthood', modeled on the earlier term 'wait unemployment'. Unlike “adolescence,” a normative, scripted stage of development, or a “gap year,” a brief, voluntary, and often privileged interlude, waithood is an imposed economic purgatory, a collective holding pattern without an arrival gate. It is the shared bedroom at twenty-eight, the advanced degree that leads only to the gig economy queue, and the indefinite engagement that cannot afford a wedding—a generation living in the parenthesis of a sentence that may never conclude.
noun
- A period of limbo faced by young college graduates in developing countries, in which activities belonging to the traditional transition into adulthood, such as marriage and buying a home, are put off to allow the securing of employment or money.