the wife beating verse

[Violet]

I guess this is because "mature" has no clear cut definition.

In that case, why use the term at all?

"No"? I wasn't being sarcastic, I was serious. Nor was I suggesting that the rate of aging is affected by age. However, it is not difficult to argue that older people tend to be physically older than younger people, no?

So far as I can tell: time moves for no man. Cosmically, we are all the same age... but I would agree that yes, under normal circumstances: the older a person's body becomes, the more physically distanced it will tend to be from where it started (puberty, prostate cancer).

I think this is another problem of definition. Above, you stated that even slightly mature is still technically mature, which is correct. This is not what I had originally thought you meant by "mature" and I doubt it is what Al-Fatihah meant when he said she was "marture" at age nine. Here, I was referring to the physical process of aging. Some things can accelerate or decellerate this process, so it can be influenced by things other then age (i.e. someone looking younger than they are or older than they are). Now if you are referring to aging as in getting older, completely seperate from the body, then of course it is determined by age or, more precicely, it determines age (by definition), though not necessarily physical age.

Everything philosophical does seem to boil down to semantics, it's why I've not done this bullshit in so long

And why cannot she be mature (significantly so) at age nine? I know 72yo men who are very 'immature', why cannot the scale go another direction too? As for 'physical' maturity, which we've STILL YET TO DEFINE...

Nine year old female children can be pregnant, have small breasts, and grow faster into adulthood than most people their age. They can even look like mid-teenagers at the most extreme unlikeliness.

And age as determined by age alone has no bearing on anything, part of what makes me laugh derisively at every 'age line' in existence.

Again, I think definitions have been mixed up. If people did not physically age then they would indeed not mature physically either. I misuderstood what you meant by aging.

I mean many things by aging, and yet also nothing. I have yet to see maturity defined.

I don't disagree with that. In fact, the entire heart of the matter is the fact that "mature" is so hard to define. If anyone needs to define mature, it is Al-Fatihah, as he is the one who argued a nine year old was "mature" enough to have sex with a grown man. I do not know what he meant by it; he could have meant sexually (as he said "has reached puberty and is mature") or emotionally.

Well then, he should step up and bloody define what he means already Here's the best way I've seen it put, courtesy of my dictionary

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"fully developed physically; full-grown : she was now a mature woman | owls are sexually mature at one year.
• having reached an advanced stage of mental or emotional development characteristic of an adult"

"Most of us would prefer to mature rather than simply age. Mature implies gaining wisdom, experience, or sophistication as well as adulthood; when applied to other living things, it indicates fullness of growth and readiness for normal functioning (: a mature crop of strawberries). To age, on the other hand, is to undergo the changes that result from the passage of time, often with an emphasis on the negative or destructive changes that accompany growing old (: the tragedy aged him five years)."

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You do know I'm just pulling your leg with this whole thing, right? Nonetheless, defining the key word in your argument is vital for it to succeed, especially given that it is a word with more uses than an Englishman.