third culture kid
n.— «Sonia wants to return to Kenya sometime—”I mean, it’s my home”—but doesn’t know when. As a Kenyan-Indian who moved to Singapore when she was six and lived there for 14 years before attending college in the U.S., she’s used to being away from home. “I don’t know where I belong… they have a name for us. We’re called Third Culture Kids,” she said, referring to children who’ve lived for a significant period of time in a culture other than their own and have integrated elements of both into a third culture.» —“Experiencing Kenya’s riots first-hand” by Phillip Blumberg in George Washington University GW Hatchet (Washington, D.C.) Feb. 19, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
Aubrey in Waco, Texas, says her mother used to warn the kids against contracting honkus of the bonkus, a fanciful name for a contagious disease. This colloquial term probably comes from the words bonk and konk, meaning “to hit” or...