Less young = old?

My company made me take Italian language courses as it officially uses Italian as its language.
Still learning, I've found lots of new interesting things in Italian language that sometimes just doesn't translate to other language.

Today I've found one of those.

The term is : meno giovane

meno would mean less
giovane would mean young

so...less young? younger?

nope.

it's some kind of a polite way to say "old".

Because to say old = vecchio has some kind of connotation that it's outdated, so to soften the blow  be polite, they sometimes use that term: meno giovane.

I somehow have a hard time wrapping my head around that meaning though.

My head has the concept visually mapped like this:

baby..........................young..............................old

so I visualize less young to be:

baby.......less young.....young..............................old


yet apparently with the translation in italian this concept becomes:

baby..........................young......less young........old


I still need time to think this through.