“How Old Are You?
“You may turn out to be an old fogy of eighteen or a jitterbug of eighty.”
So begins the short article that I found in the April 1942 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. The main point of the article is this curious quiz entitled “Have You Grown Up Yet? ” The quiz is below, so get your pencils ready; but first, here are the instructions:
Answer every question either “Yes” or “No”. On your paper, make one “Yes” column and give yourself 5 points for every “Yes”. In a separate “No” column, give yourself 5 points for every “No.” Then see what your total is for each answer.
Now get ready, there are some strange questions here:
Ok, now, the instructions go on to say that
The “No” score represents emotional maturity and the “Yes” score emotional immaturity. A high “No” score should send you a bouquet, but a high “Yes” score should make you take a careful personal inventory.
At this point, I feel I have to re-read some of the questions.
1. Do you tint or dye your hair? Covering your gray apparently shows that you are actually not as mature as you think.
14. Do you have an emotional reaction to any of these words: Communist; strike; adultery; divorce; false teeth? This confuses me. You can’t hear about divorce or adultery, for instance, and feel any type of emotion, and still be a mature adult?
And the best of all:
4. Do you disapprove of Mrs. Roosevelt? I still don’t understand how that made it into the quiz, other than to assume that the author supports Mrs. Roosevelt!
But just for fun, now that you do have your final score, there is one further step to take:
Compare your score with your actual age to find out how far you are lagging behind or how far ahead of yourself you are.
So, if you are thirty years old, but ended up with an 80 in the “Yes” column, you have 50 years of maturity to catch up on!
Okay, so maybe the quiz does not make a lot of sense, but it’s still fun to step back into the concerns of another time and to see how differently we viewed things. After all, there are tons of online quizzes around when you’re ready to come back!
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