Talk:Failure to launch

Alternate definition?
I see that the sources are fairly recent on this so I don't doubt that there's at least new meanings of the word, but my understanding of this word as of 20 years ago wasn't so much failure to leave a parent's household, but rather extended failure to leave college/university life. In other words, "FTLs" were people who graduated college and then hung around - staying in the same college town, staying friends with undergraduates, going to college parties, etc. They very well might have a job, but it'd be a mark-time one "beneath" their presumed long-term earning prospects - working menial jobs at the college itself, a nearby restaurant, etc. It's admittedly a flexible definition - nobody will accuse someone whose significant other was a year or two beneath them who sticks around of being an FTL, and the line gets blurred for universities in big cities where sticking around isn't as weird as in small college towns - but that was the rough idea. There was a similar marker of "disappointment" but it didn't necessarily have to be total unemployment. Is there any literature on this older version of the term? Or did I just exist in a weird local slang bubble? SnowFire (talk) 08:20, 21 June 2022 (UTC)