Hacker News Reader

Do you have a better term to suggest?

First: Why should there be a term at all? Stop thinking of yourself and others in generic bureaucratic or therapeutic terms from a particularly dire era of mass self-absorption.

Second: If you must, "son" or "daughter", and only prefixed by "adult" when necessary for clarity.

To your first point: there should be a term because it is clearly a useful idea that people want to communicate. The ambiguity or inelegance of what current exists to express the idea means we should at least desire a better way of expressing it - that is, a term for it.

To your second point: "son" or "daughter" is not sufficiently general, and it is gendered. What if I wanted to express the idea of adult offspring without knowing (or caring about) the gender of that person?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com