The significance of others

Of all the weird little turns of language that have reached prominence in the, what do we call this decade anyway? In the 20's century everyone was comfortable from every decade starting in the 1920's to be "the 20's, the sixties, etc." And then everything fell apart at the beginning of the new millennium and we started trying things like the "oughty-oughts.:"

And now there's been nothing to pick up the slack. I fear we are seeing a new generation that doesn't understand the importance of the round-numberness of the decades. We're in our teens now, aren't we?

Sorry, got sidetracked there. What I was going to say is that there's almost no phrase that I utter frequently that makes me feel more awkward than "significant other." Both of my daughters are in their 20's and it seems weird to call a 28 year-old guy a boyfriend. Though I have no trouble referring to my father's 92 year-old girlfriend (he calls her his 'companion.'). So often when I describe everyone coming to the house for Thanksgiving I refer to my daughters and their significant others. And I seem to be able to do it without irony, which is surprising, but it still doesn't seem right.

What made me think about this was the reaction by people we know to their coming, the awkward questions about "where are they going to sleep?" Honestly, do people really still think this way? That a 20-something kids in a serious relationship is not going to sleep in the same bed? "Not under my roof, I tell you!" Says...well, nobody I know. Maybe it's the time I grew up (The Sixties!) and maybe we're just cool parents. Either way I find it kind of laughable, so "Ha."

The word for these adult relationships is a long running joke with me and one of my friends. We remember reading something, in the National Lampoon or some such thing, where a narrator refers to someone as his paramour and then laments, "I wish there were a better word." And of course this is English, so there's almost always a better word, but not for this.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the phrase significant other, aside from the wild variations of meanings you can attach to those words. A significant other could be a statistically meaningful alien. So you could mean that when you're talking about your boyfriend and he'd never know. Are we all okay with that? I'm not sure. I'll be back to you in the 20's.