A fact from Failure to launch appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 21 June 2022 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
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The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was: promoted by Z1720 (talk) 23:51, 14 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Overall: Article is new enough, long enough and has no issues. Hook is cited and (imo) interesting. BuySomeApples (talk) 23:33, 13 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
Article is new enough, long enough and has no issues. Hook is cited and (imo) interesting. BuySomeApples (talk) 23:33, 13 June 2022 (UTC)