My sister recently told me how nice it was that she and her husband had the chance to go to an “adult” party over the holidays. I knew she simply meant a party with no children present, and that it was a nice change for her, since most of her social events involve young’uns.
When I passed the story on to my co-worker, who also knows my sister, she was briefly confused and seemed to think that my sister had suddenly become a swinger. I should have said “grown-up” party, I guess.
I can picture some skeevy guy in that section jerking off to a Jane Austen novel – and looking really disappointed.
What great timing. Last night, as a member of my local library board, we had to handle a complaint that the new library we are building has a large adult section. I had a hard time keeping a straight face as we explained that these “adultz” books have less pictures than the books they are used to reading.
We had Movie Night at church. Some of the members complained that all the DVDs were for kids.
I took the minutes at the church council meeting where it was discussed. A partial transcript appears below.
Regards,
Shodan
As has been observed, it’s mostly context-based. The best way to avoid confusion is to either use another word (e.g. “grown-up”) or rephrase the sentence so that adult isn’t directly modifying the word (“a film for adults” versus “an adult film”). There are also certain contexts that are almost exclusively understood to apply to the euphemistic meaning: few people would think of an “adult film star” as anybody but a porno actor, for example.
I’m assuming you’re referencing the programming block on Cartoon Network here. I don’t know if they do it anymore, but they used to have eyecatches that involved footage of swimming pools with a lifeguard-ish voice saying things like, “All the kids out of the pool.” Always seemed pretty clear to me, even though I wasn’t personally familiar with the practice, that they were referencing something like closing off a public facility (in this case, the cable channel) for use by a certain subset of the population (older teens and adults, versus children) who might otherwise be expected to use it. This would have been back in the early 2000s (think 2001 to 2003 or so), since that’s when I had cable in college.
This happened on an episode of 30 Rock. Liz had an ‘adult’ photo of herself on her clel phone and Kenneth thought that meant it was a pic of her driving a car.
There was a retirement community being built near where I used to live, with a giant sign advertising the town’s newest and best ADULT COMMUNITY. The old couple on the sign looked very happy indeed. The bullshit we made up about the services going to be offered filled up many hours at the nearby pub!
We figured it was a better place to retire than the one located right beside the massive cemetery (which we joked should simply have a catapult on the roof to save transportation costs…)
When the radio plays “adult contemporary” music, it’s rarely pornographic.
My impression (I am not a qualified pornologist) is that some variation on ‘Erotik’ or ‘Sex’ or (less often) ‘Porno’ is used.
Mr Darcy, Vampyre, you mean? Or would it be Pride, Prejudice and Zombies?
The latter of which will be made into a movie starring Natalie Portman, apparently.