I had a thought the other day while walking home from the library – I can’t recall ever being called a “Young Adult” as a child or a teenager. “Young Lady” once in a while, but no good sentence ever started with (or ended with, or contained) the words “Young Lady.” So who came up with the idea of calling books for teenagers Young Adult books? I get that it was an attempt to find a label that wouldn’t seem childish and thus off-putting to potential readers, but it’s a pretty lame attempt. Most teenagers have a fair amount of contempt for adults, so using “Adult” isn’t necessarily going to gain you any points, and putting the “Young” in front of it just adds condescension. I’d be open to other suggestions, but as a stop-gap solution, I say call it “Teen.”
As for the 10-12 set, who are often reading from that section too, well, adults are lame and boring – who wants to be an adult? Whereas teenagers are cool. So I say skip straight from Young Readers (which is also an annoyingly condescending title, but its at least vaguely accurate, plus at that point you’re so excited to be reading real chapter books that it doesn’t matter so much what you call it) to Teen, and call it a day.
Note: I’m aware that the 10-12 age group is called “Tweens” now, but that word hadn’t been invented yet when I was 11, I can’t even think it let alone say it without cringing, and I’ve never heard it come out of the mouth of an actual *cringe* Tween. So not an acceptable bookstore label, IMO.
Note 2: Having done some cursory research, Barnes and Noble does in fact use “Teen”, although I have vague memories that this was not always the case. Amazon, and the Brooklyn and New York public libraries use Young Adult.
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February 1, 2009 at 11:35 am
Along similar lines, have you ever heard anyone under the age of, I don’t know, 40 talk about “the youth”? I feel like political organizing has put me in constant contact with older people talking about the need for “youth” to be represented, but even when I had a very strong identity as a young person, I had never thought of myself with that word. It always makes me think of My Cousin Vinny: “The two youts…”
February 4, 2009 at 1:54 pm
I think why we’ve still got it is because publishers came up with the YA category in the 1960s — before that, everything was childrens’, whether it was a picture book or a chapter book. So who knows, maybe the term had some currency back then? Or maybe they thought it sounded classier than teen? In any event, according to everything I’ve ever read about it, they came up with the term YA just as a way to more effectively market books to schools and libraries.
I definitely never thought of myself as a “young adult” as a teen, but now that I’m far beyond justifiably calling myself a teen, can I call myself a young adult? Being actually an adult just sounds so… old. Though I guess if I claim young adult status now, at some point I will become an “old adult.” Hmm….
February 4, 2009 at 10:39 pm
That’s interesting, tinypants. Was the book industry expanding into more refined categories generally at that point, or was it specifically teenagers that were being newly marketed to?
More recently, I’ve noticed Barnes & Noble has moved its “teen” section out of the children’s section. (Which, let me tell you, would have changed many a high school afternoon for Emily and I had it happened in our day. Although, maybe we would have just taken the teen books into the kids’ section, where there was usually seating, if also messy, loud things.)
February 5, 2009 at 10:36 am
Tinypants – I think you’re probably right about the invention of the term, and judging from movies I think it was at least somewhat in use (although I’d imagine not appreciated by teenagers back then either). My dad occasionally refers to me and my friends now as “young adults,” meaning that we are in fact adults, but we’re still young to him. I tend to refer to myself as a “fake adult,” because while I go through the motions of adulthood, like having a job and paying rent and stuff, I am so not actually a grown-up!
I worked at Barnes and Nobles a few years ago when they started moving the teen sections around – the thought (and it makes sense) was that teenagers & older kids didn’t want to go into a section where the first thing they saw was board books because it would seem babyish to them.
February 5, 2009 at 7:24 pm
At the same time, maybe the “Young Adult” genre has better connotations than “Teen”, or at least, puts on more airs. You think Young Adult, you get images of Newbury Awards. You think Teen, and you’re wading knee-deep in vampire romances, lipstick lesbian dramas, and high school angst fests.