Talk:919: Tween Bromance

Language elitist. Davidy²²[talk] 09:26, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

I think this needs an incomplete flag: the explanation needs more contextual detail, about colloquial portmanteaus like 'frenemy' and the common disapproval of 'words' like 'irregardless'. --Mynotoar (talk) 08:59, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

GAH! He's not DICTATING, the title is another joke! Tween? Bromance? Come on fellas and ladies. They are the first two portmanteaus! Cueball is essentially spitting out a sentence with an endless stream of irritating, inane, infintilisms, in an incredibly insensitive, lol, effort to drive Megan to the brink of insanity! Couldn't resist that last one. Yiffed made me giggle, the rest, connected to it, made my abs hurt from laughing, especially after Megan's reaction. He deserves a medal. Oh goodness. No profile so please don't use my IP address to violate me via the Internetz, if that is possible to do with an IP address. I would not know. Grazie. 173.245.55.84 09:32, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm not anybody here, I was just passing by and enjoying the annotations on these xkcd comics, but it seems to me like no explanation of this comic would be complete without talking about word aversion, sometimes called "the moist panties phenomenon", if someone wants to be funny. Basically, he is listing words that make people (or Randall himself?) uncomfortable. This page --- http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004835.html -- talks about word aversion in relation to the more common "word rage" that some neologisms and words that began as errors provoke. 108.162.237.192 08:52, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

The back of the chair is missing in the first frame. Probably just a mistake but didn't see it mentioned. 108.162.216.33 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Just a question: tween really is PRE-adolescent?? I always thought it was the equivalent of ten -> teen for twenty, so someone out of their teens, but in their (presumably early) twenties. I definitely have seen it used as such on different occasions, but it might have been by non-native speakers, as I am not living in an english-speaking country. Also, in my opinion, the rest of the comic has more of a twenty-somethings-who-never-came-out-of-puberty ring to it than a child's. 162.158.85.69 19:41, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

2 minutes ago I thought the same. I definitely saw that usage as an anglicism in German somewhere. However a quick google search proved, that the definition given here (children aged ~9-12) seems to be the actual one. --Lupo (talk) 08:56, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

I think there are two parallel usages in play. I'm not a native speaker, but "tweens" is used by Tolkien in the Lord of the rings for the twenties in hobbits, who are only considered adult in their early thirties. Any usage derived from this probably refers to the early twenties. The books (and later the films) are a staple of popular culture around the world, so that slipping into a current vocabulary would not surprise me. Wether it was redefined to mean another age group by someone not familiar with the story or reinvented via a different etymology is a mystery to me. Definitely confused me the first time I read it somewhere with the other meaning. 162.158.154.139 10:45, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

By my understanding, a "tween" is someone aged (roughly) 10-12, i.e. somewhere "between" early childhood and teenager-hood. 108.162.215.118 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Oh, so one should stop searching for "tween porn"? 198.41.242.119 13:42, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

It seems the link to the "portmanteau" changed. Perhaps an archive copy can be found? 172.70.147.131 18:18, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Why is this in furries category!? Moderator (talk) 23:11, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Nevermind Moderator (talk) 23:11, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

updated for the new generation: "By my sigma grindset, my oomfie rizzed so hard her moist gyatt made her skibidi in Ohio!" Arthur101 (talk) 15:48, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

STOP IT STOP IT! 172.70.90.82 13:25, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

Isn't "tween" originally from LotR/the Hobbit referring to an adult hobbit who is not yet 33? - Human Physics Padawan 2a00:8a60:c000:1:888a:1d9:785a:2842 (talk) 07:22, 5 September 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

In the context of JRR's world, and longer-lived hobbits*, "in (roughly) the twenties (of age)" is still adolescent and called a "tween", from the "twe(e)nties". ( * - assuming similar length days and years! But humans of Middle Earth aren't obviously also age-extended by simple calendar refactoring tricks!)

But it has probably at least once more been reinvented independently, since then, this time to insteadvprimarily cover the pre-teen/post-single-digits rough range that is perbaps more relevent to the comic scenario. And related terminology.

When Tolkien coined his own version, ('50s, or earlier), even teenagers were not yet as fully distinct as they are these days, as a widely accepted period of adolescence between childhood and (de facto, if not de jure) adulthood. For those that moved straight from school to work (several years younger than we might expect these days, as well) they were mostly expected and expecting to be treated as switched straight to adults in that era, only starting to get significant amounts of transitional adolescents who were "out of short trousers" (for the boys, at least) but not yet settled as nominal adults. Not all across the class and (in western terms, at least) national divides.

Though you'll find more historic examples in various subsets of the sociological strata, I am sure this "tween" is of the current usage and not the LOTR 'parallel' neologism. 82.132.237.27 15:31, 5 September 2025 (UTC)