Is this why people have an unconscious prejudice for tall people?
Evidence points to an overwhelming advantage to being tall. Perhaps people thought of the distance from heaven as a real thing, that someone whose head reaches further into space must be closer to God, closer to the angels, closer to knowledge, Growing up meaning literally growing up. Getting closer to closer to perfection.
When I was in middle school, I remember watching one of my fellow students do something stupid and thinking, “It’s possible that she’ll never grow out of that. It’s possible that we won’t age into perfection.” Until then, I had believed that growing up meant learning it all, getting closer and closer to perfection with age. But in a flash, I could see how that 11 year old girl was not all that different from the 7 year old girl I’d known and how she might still be the same at 31.
Growing up means literally growing up for a while and then it means something else entirely.
The Hamlet Project 