Wiregrass Seniors Magazine May 2018 MAY ISSUE | Page 12

Page 12
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Ethel and Earl
Heavy snow had buried the car in Ethel and
Earl’s driveway. Earl dug around the wheels
for an hour. Then he explained to Ethel that
once the van starts moving good, do not stop
until you get where you are going. Then he
got behind the van and they proceeded to
rock it back and forth, until finally, it was
free and Ethel was on her way.
As Earl walked back into the house, the
phone was ringing.
He answered and a frantic Ethel said,
“Thank goodness you answered, There’s is an
alarming sound coming from under the van
right now and for a moment, I thought I was
dragging you down the highway!”
Earl yelled into the phone
“And you haven’t stopped YET?”
How Do Generations Get Their Names?
We all know what a Millennial is. There are stereo-
types about what Millennials do and do not like, how
lazy they may or may not be, and how often they check
their Twitter feeds—all because we're comfortable
using this single term to refer to an entire age demo-
graphic of the population. Millennial is a powerful
word, and not because of the age group it refers to,
but because of just how useful it is—just like Gen X
or Baby Boomer.
There is no single or even typical way that genera-
tions historically get their names, because lumping
everyone who's roughly the same age together is a
relatively new phenomenon.
According to Peter Francese, a demographic and
consumer markets expert, Baby Boomers were the
first named generation to exist. (Those that came ear-
lier, like The Greatest Generation that fought in World
War II, were named retroactively.) It all started when
the Census Bureau referred to the years between
1946 and 1964, during which birthrates rocketed up
from around 3 million a year to over 4 million a year,
as the "Post War Baby Boom." As the kids born in
this boom started to grow into adults (and thus, con-
sumers), ad agencies found traction by marketing their
products to so-called Baby Boomers. This would be
the first (and so far last) time a generation's "official"
name would come from a government organization.
Eventually—as will inevitably happen to all of us, even
the most maturity-challenged Millennials—the Baby
Boomers got older and thus less appealing to com-
panies with something to sell. The ad agencies
wanted another catch-all term for the new members
of their target age group and began shopping around
different terms.
"They throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks,"
Francese says. "And in some of the meetings, they
don’t stick." That's how Generation Y, a proto-term
for Millennials, went in and out of fashion. "Genera-
tion Y was too difficult to say, too hard to brand, it
didn’t have the cachet, it didn’t have the spark of
Millennials," Francese says.
Not sticking is a matter of whether or not media or-
ganizations start using the term. As for determining
the dates for Millennials, it all came down to