Is it common to describe one’s life stage in English, like “Stage III Hemingways”?

Question

I found the word, “men who looked like stage three Hemingways” in the following sentence of Maureen Dowd’s article, titled “Farewell to Macho,” in the New York Times (October 15):

“Diliberto recalled that when her Hadley bio was first published in 1992, she was surprised to find her book readings filled with men “who looked like stage-three Hemingways” with white beards and safari jackets straining over their bellies. They all wanted to be Hemingway, to live his outdoorsy, action-packed life.”

When I hear the word, “Stage three” in Japanese, I instantly associate it with the significantly progressed or serious stage of cancer at the “Stage III,” where surgical operation might no longer be so helpful, but “Stage three” in the above quote seems to simply imply a life stage passing the prime of age.

Is it a common wording, “stage I, II, III, and IV of a person”, like “Stage three Hemingways”? Is President Obama now on his “Stage II”?

Answer 1

This is figurative usage. I would not say it's common, but I believe it would be widely understood in the US.

Just as you associate Stage III with a medical term indicating that you have a "serious case" of something, if you poetically call someone a stage-three X, it's as if that X is a disease, and the person in question has got it bad.

What's important to recognize about this phrase is that it's generally used in a mocking way. In this context, the narrator is mocking overweight older men who have dreams of being like the young, outdoorsy, manly author Hemingway.

Another example: If your best friend went away to college and became obsessed with indie music, oversized glasses and tight pants, when you met on winter break you might say she'd become a stage-three hipster.

Probably because the phrase is intended to insult or mock someone, you don't really hear about stage-two Xs - why insult people less when you can insult them more? (But there's no reason you couldn't use it - e.g., If Max is a stage-three band geek, Mary is just a stage-two.)

You would probably not use this to describe Obama (unless it were as part of an insult similar to the ones above).