preciocious.
adjective
(of a child) having developed certain abilities or proclivities at an earlier age than usual.
A series of articles is making the rounds on the internet today decrying the “
bizarre", “
weird”, “
crazy”, "
really deep" interviews by Jaden and Willow Smith as "
utter nonsense".
"Who do these kids think they are?", asks 35 year-old Yahoo News writer Dylan Stableford:
The responses from the aspiring 14-year-old and 16-year-old musicians were so self-aware, they seemed befitting of subjects well beyond their combined 30 years.
Thank you, Mr. Stableford, for clarifying for us the reasonable limits of young human intellect. Those kids were so out of bounds. How dare the teenage son and daughter of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith give abstract, outside-the-box answers to questions such as "What have you been reading?", "What are some of the themes that recur in your work?", "What are the things worth having?", "I’m curious about your experience of time", and "What are you searching for in those pieced-together moments?"
The two young persons respond with totally inappropriate and too-hard-to-believe-for-a-smart-young-teenager answers like,
Quantum physics.
It’s proven that how time moves for you depends on where you are in the universe. It’s relative to beings and other places.
The melancholiness of the ocean; the melancholiness of everything else.
Something that’s worth buying to me is like Final Cut Pro or Logic.
Honestly, we’re just trying to make music that we think is cool.
Apparently, black teenagers who
are into physics, geometry, philosophy; think about sadness and consciousness in art; express affinity towards rebellion; or talk about life-long learning are sooooooo pretentious and narcissistic that grown women and men, many twice their age and mostly white, have taken to the internet to ridicule these kids' words as unbecoming, untoward, and unbelievable.
On the surface, this clarion stems from Jaden and Willow being famous kids given a New York Times blog piece for an upcoming music release, and ostensibly from some of their answers being meandering, abstract, and self-absorbed--This? From teenagers?? No!!!--but I have a hard time believing that today's clamorous chorus isn't also so snide and vociferous because these two black kids are answering in metaphors while referencing art, literature, music, physics, philosophy, Buddhism, and social science in an interview.
Because black kids can't be precocious.