We Americans talk about two kinds of generations: intellectual and demographic.  Intellectual generations are not really generations at all, but are movements (the Beat Generation, for example), sometimes spanning only a decade--so that the same people might be called part of one generation one decade and another generation the next.  Demographic generations (like Babyboomers) are closer to what we mean by generations: a distinguishable group of people, born in a 20 to 40 year period, most of whom, we presume, share some of the same experiences and values.  So we don’t confuse the two, let’s talk about intellectual generations first and demographic generations next.

While, as the Bible shows, generation gaps were not invented in America, here intellectual generations surfaced immediately.  The Puritans no sooner arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century than they began to fret, with good reason, that they might not pass the intensity of their religious vision to the second generation.  Worried about the gradual corruption of their mission, the Puritans delivered from the pulpit jeremiads about the declension of society.

Similarly, tensions between intellectual generations arose during the founding of the United States.  In the 1760s and 1770s, the Revolutionary generation, such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, were interested in diffusing the power held centrally by the English Crown and spreading that power instead to decentralized independent states (former colonies).  In the 1780s and 1790s a younger Constitutional generation, such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, had a quite different agenda.  They worked to create, in the Constitution, a federal government with enough centralized power to bring strength and affluence to the weak collection of former colonies.

Yet intellectual generations didn’t produce their strongest impact until about the beginning of the 20th century.  Why?  Because at that point the Industrial Revolution sparked a national network of communication and transportation that obliterated regionalism.  Beginning then, young people, in a culture with national instead of local horizons, began to identify with their own generation instead of their own region.

In the 1870s, for example, when regionalism still ruled, Ralph Waldo Emerson would have felt more in common with William James, despite their forty-year age difference, than with those his own age, because Emerson and James were both New Englanders.  Conversely, in the 1950s, well after regionalism had given way to a national culture, an Oregon beat poet like Gary Snyder would feel more in common with a New York beat poet of his own generation, like Allen Ginsberg, than he would to another Oregon poet of a different generation.

Therefore, the first intellectual generation to think of itself, self-consciously and artistically, as a distinct entity emerged during and after World War I, and was the first group of Americans to have been raised in a post-regional culture following the Industrial Revolution.  This group of intellectuals was branded the Lost Generation, and featured writers such as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  They adopted the bohemian lifestyle, although their detractors dismissed it as a pose.

The first gypsies arrived in Western Europe from Bohemia in the 15th century and were called Bohemians.  The word then slowly changed from meaning a true gypsy to meaning a gypsy of society, as shown in Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair, in which Becky Sharp’s wild, roving nature is attributed to her parents, “who were Bohemians by taste and circumstances.”  The concept had also come to include poor, nonconforming artists, as in Henry Murger’s romanticized account of the poor and passionate artist’s life in Paris in his 1849 Scenes de la Vie of Boheme.  Thus in America Bohemian was used by the 1850s to mean a wandering or homeless adventurer; in the 1860s-80s to mean a hard-drinking, loose-living roving reporter, as one covering the Civil War or roaming the far West; and by 1919 was widely used to refer to poor, nonconforming, and scandalously immoral writers and artists, and soon to any avant-garde nonconformist.

The student quarter of Paris has been called the Latin Quarter since the Middle Ages, because students at the University of Paris learned and  were required to converse in Latin.  Bohemian artists and writers have long been associated with this student quarter, because student-style rooms and restaurants are cheap; thus by the 1870s Latin Quarter had come to mean any poor, Bohemian neighborhood in a large city.  Around World War I the Left Bank, referring to the left bank of the Seine River in Paris, became something of a synonym for a Latin Quarter.  By the 1890s in American the name Greenwich Village already conjured up an image of a native Latin Quarter, being known as a section of New York City where artists and writers could live cheaply.  However, its bohemian reputation didn’t really flower until after World War I with the Lost Generation, and by 1930 most of the famous writers and artists had left.

Gertrude Stein said she had heard the term lost generation in a conversation with a French garage owner.  After hearing it from her, Ernest Hemingway used it in the epigraph to his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, which became a bible to the rootless, disillusioned young adults who came to maturity during World War I.  This lost generation became a landmark term and led to later concepts and terms such as the Beat Generation and the hippies of the 1960s counterculture.

By 1931 hep was occasionally being pronounced hip.  This led to calling hep girls hip chicks and calling hepsters (jive dancers and fans) hipsters by the late 1930s.  Thus the 1903 hep became the 1931 hip and that hep + cat became hepcat by 1935. It seems, and probably is, this way, but nobody knows for sure, because no one knows where hep comes from: some say it comes from an all-knowing Chicago bartender of the 1890s, Joe Hep (which seems unlikely), some say that hip was the original word (coming from the opium smoker’s on the hip, smoking opium, which was done lying on one’s side or hip), and there is even the possibility that hep, hip, and hepcat come from the African Walof hipicat (meaning “one who has his eyes wide open”).

By 1945 hip had completely replaced hep in informed circles, cat had come to mean any aware person (by the 1950s it was to mean any person at all), and hipster was beginning to mean a devotee of the new “progressive jazz” from the West Coast.  The intellectual, nonemotional jazz was also called cool jazz as opposed to the hot jazz of the 1920s.  It was cool or beat, both meaning unemotional, aloof.  Beat had meant exhausted, physically and emotionally drained, since 1834; as a verb to cool has meant to calm down since the year 1000 and, as an adjective, cool has meant unemotional since the 1830s (Americans have used the expression cool as a cucumber since 1836).

During the decade of 1945-55 hipster drifted away from its jazz meaning and was applied to any hip or cool youth.  The cool jazz fan’s vocabulary also moved into general student use, so that some of the youthful catch terms most frequently heard were cool, real cool, crazy, far out, gone, real gone, nervous, out of sight, and wild--all vaguely meaning great, wonderful, satisfying, exciting, or unique.  Other terms of the era included nowhere and Squaresville for nonhip or disliked things, and Coolsville for good ones.

By 1957, when Beat novelist Jack Kerouac published his On the Road, and even more clearly by November 1959 when Kerouac, accompanied by Steve Allen’s piano, read his poetry on the Steve Allen Plymouth Show on NBC, we began to talk about a new American type, the Beat, originally with a capital B.  The Beat seemed an extension of the super cool college-age youth, not only repelled by post-World War II, atomic-age American materialism but rejecting bourgeois career-oriented life and withdrawing from traditional American values, emotions, and rationalism to seek his own identity.  He was talked about as leading a spontaneous, roving life (on his motorcycle, by hitchhiking, or from an old car or vividly painted converted bus) while searching for nirvana with the aid of drugs, jazz, poetry, and casual sex.  There were few such real beats, but the press found them sensational and the beats’ own writers expressed themselves well and loudly, as in Allen Ginsberg’s long 1955 poem Howl and Kerouac’s novels On the Roadand The Dharma Bums (1958).  Beat became a widely used word in 1957; the beats were said to be beat, to lead a beat life, and to make up the Beat Generation. They called themselves beat because they identified with the down and out, the marginalized in society, the people who were homeless or junkies or wanderers: the beaten people, or the beat people.  These writers also called themselves Beats as a shortened form of the word beatific, meaning radiantly enlightened.  Then on April 2, 1958, they were first called beatniks, unflatteringly, in Herb Caen’s popular “Bagdad-by-the-Bay” column in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Beatnik was one of the first subversive-sounding -nik words (all of them epithets) based on the suffix contained in the name of the first man-made space satellite, the Russian Sputnik, launched in October, 1957.

By 1957 the true beats had followers, a growing number of hipsters who, that year, were first called hippies, younger versions of the beats, often anti-establishment kids from affluent middle-class homes who had become dropouts from school and society.  The older beats looked down on hippies as not being true free spirits but merely college kids living a unique but still consciously patterned life.  Such a me-too beat was also called a rebel without a cause, a pop psychology term from Robert Lindner’s 1954 book The Fifty-Minute Hour and the name of the popular 1955 James Dean movie (this modern concept of “rebel” going back to Albert Camus’s 1951 novel The Rebel).

In the hippie counterculture of the 1960s, groovy (perhaps from a groove of a record album, maybe from a pleasurable routine, or possibly from a sexual allusion) meant wonderful and exhilarating.  A person who was worried or insistent on being conventional was up tight.  Conversations or situations were heavy if they were deeply significant or burdensome.  A good point, good connection in conversation, or statement with which you were in complete agreement, was right on.  Anything that was pleasantly outrageous was bitchin’.

By the early 1960s everyone was talking about these hippies, their attitudes and life-styles, their colorfully patched jeans, sandals, long hair, granny glasses and love beads, their temporary crash pads and their permanent pads (apartments, rooms, originally an opium addict’s term for a couch or bed, then in jazz musician’s use by 1915).  Parents talked about ways to prevent their teenagers from becoming hippies, from running away to the hippies’ mecca the Haight, or, more popularly, Hashbury, the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco (Hashbury from blending the two street names, reinforced by the slang hash for hashish), or to New York’s suddenly blossoming East Village, and of keeping them out of the hippies’ rapidly spreading drug culture.  If you liked hippies you called them flower children and approved of their flower power and love is slogans; if you hated them you called them beatniks, but it was the word hippies that most people used most often, and beats, hipsters, and hippies had all become one in the public mind.  By the end of the 1960s a few hippies had settled in hippie communes, some had completely disappeared into the world of drugs, some had returned to a more traditional life--and all had been a major influence on our language, fashions, and attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s.

The other side of the movement was more outwardly political and comprised the various New Left protest groups with agendas that promoted antiwar activity, free speech, greater racial and economic equality, and an end to university military research.  Those associated with the New Left and other political persuasions opposed the war, fought pigs (police), and asked for people power, open government, and participatory democracy (older liberals wanted representative democracy instead of direct or participatory democracy).

Even though only a small percentage of Americans ever outwardly protested or demonstrated against the Vietnam War, most Americans opposed the war after the January, 1968 Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese. The antiwar movement gave rise to many terms which continued in use long after the fighting ended. The word hawk, for example, described an advocate or staunch supporter of the war, from Thomas Jefferson’s 1798 term War Hawk.  The first use of hawk in modern times had been to refer to those advisers who urged President Kennedy to take a belligerent stance during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (a Soviet-U.S. confrontation on the placing of Russian missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from the U.S.).  The term then remained in use and was soon applied to advocates of the Vietnam War.

Dove was first used to mean the opposite of a hawk during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, then soon came to mean one who wanted peace in Vietnam.  The dove had long been a symbol of peace, but its use in the 1960s was strongly reinforced by a famous Picasso drawing of a dove which the Communists had used on posters as a peace symbol since the 1950s and which was often seen on antiwar posters and placards after 1965.

The peace movement referred to the various groups and individuals who protested against the war, using such methods as peace marches, peace demonstrations, and teach-ins.  One of the largest student protest groups was the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), an early New Left group organized in 1962 on college campuses to protest the war.  One of the leading groups among nonstudents was SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) which had been founded in 1957 to create public pressure for a nuclear test ban treaty and, after this goal was achieved in 1963, turned to working for worldwide disarmament and to opposing the war.

A draft-card burner was any draft-aged male who signified he would refuse to be drafted into the armed forces by burning his draft card publicly at an antiwar demonstration.  Similarly, a draft evader was any draft-aged male who evaded the draft, as by fleeing to Canada or Sweden.  Antiwar groups coined this new term to distinguish those who evaded the draft for idealistic, antiwar reasons from those old-fashioned draft-dodgers who dodged the draft because of cowardice.  By the war’s end, 137,000 Americans were officially listed as being sought by authorities as draft evaders or military deserters.  On September 16, 1974, President Ford offered such men conditional amnesty, amnesty on the condition that they serve the country for up to two years in public service jobs; however, draft evaders in exile in Canada and Sweden condemned the program as assigning guilt, and fewer than 10,000 applied for it. In the mid to late 1960s a teach-in, based on the sit-in of the Civil Rights movement, was an all-night session in a college or university classroom at which students, professors, and guest speakers argued against the war.

During the August 26-29, 1968, Democratic National Convention in Chicago (which chose President Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to run against Republican Richard Nixon) over 10,000 antiwar student demonstrators clashed with Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police, who clubbed some demonstrators and bystanders.  The most publicized of the demonstrators was the small group led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin which they humorously called the Yippies (an acronym for members of the Youth International Party, but also based on the 1957 word hippie and the 1930 exclamation of delight yippie!).  Seven leaders of the demonstration were tried as “the Chicago seven” for conspiracy to incite riots; all were found innocent of conspiracy but five were convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite riots.

The Silent Majority was originally used to mean that majority of Americans who didn’t protest or demonstrate against the war and later to mean average, middle-class Americans. Vice President Spiro Agnew used silent majority on May 9, 1969, when he said: “It is time for America’s silent majority to stand up for its rights.... America’s silent majority is bewildered by irrational protest--and looking at the sullen, scruffy minority of student protesters... [who seem to] prefer the totalitarian ideas of Mao or Ho Chi Minh....”

But the term silent majority became popular when it was used by President Nixon in a television address on November 3, 1969, just 19 days after the major antiwar moratorium in Washington, DC on October 15, 1969.  The purpose of the president’s address was to counter or subdue the mounting dissent against the war.  He said: “If a vocal minority... prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this Nation has no future as a free society.... And so tonight--to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans--I ask for your support.”

On June 17, 1972, five plumbers (secret operatives who were to plug government leaks) from Nixon’s Republican White House were caught burglarizing the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.  There in the Watergate office complex, Republicans were hoping to find material that would embarrass George McGovern and the Democrats in the 1972 presidential election.  The cover-up that ensued caused Nixon to resign in August 1974.  The Watergate scandal became such a symbol of government deceit that the suffix -gate has since been added to words to indicate the suspicion of corruption.  During Reagan’s presidency there was Irangate.  During Clinton’s tenure there were Travelgate, Filegate, and the  Whitewater scandal, which Republicans quickly labeled Whitewatergate.

By the end of the Watergate scandal in August, 1974, American culture was already deeply into the 1970s, the decade which novelist and critic Tom Wolfe branded the period of the Me Generation.  The social consciousness of the sixties had been replaced by the self-realization of the seventies.  Instead of healing society, as in the 1960s, individuals were to heal their own inner wounds and nurture their own inner-child with self-help techniques and therapies: Primal Scream Therapy, EST, Lifespring, and others.   Young people danced to recorded music in discos (short for discotheque) and caught disco fever. Fashion had flared-leg pants called bellbottoms, high-soled shoes called platform shoes, and pastel-colored leisure suits with wide-lapelled jackets and open-collared shirts.

The alienation felt in the 1970s youth culture gave rise to a pride in rebellion.  The opposition culture of the young made rebellion admirable, and so the pose of the rebellious outlaw began to be adopted.  As such, first among blacks and then among the hip young, bad (usually pronounced baad) meant good.  “He’s bad” meant the person was defiant, cool, and untouchable.  Similarly, by the 1970s sports caps were beginning to be worn backward by blacks as a sign of defiance, and by the 1980s they style had been adopted even by rich college boys.

In the 1980s the concern for self continued to increase.  Bumperstickers proclaimed: “He who dies with the most toys wins.”  Michael Milken, who traded in junkbonds on Wall Street, represented the policy that “greed is good.”  The young elites who for years had been known as preppies (those wealthy and well-connected enough to have attended private college-prep schools) were now joined by individuals known in the 1980s as yuppies: young upwardly-mobile professionals.  The acronym game blossomed quickly. Dinks were couples with double-income, no kids.  Oinks were those with one income, no kids.  You get the idea.

 The fascination with self in the 1980s extended to the physical.  Dieting and exercise were a sign of middle class membership.  It was the decade of low-fat microwave meals, light beer, nouvelle cuisine, and frozen yogurt.  My body as a temple.  People jogged, or lifted (weights) at health clubs with personal trainers.  The stairmaster machine was the altar at which yuppies worshipped.

All of these 20th century intellectual generations were populated and their causes articulated mainly by rebellious youth.  To discover the constantly recurring “new” generation, look to those aged 15 to 25.  As Malcolm Cowley, a member and chronicler of the Lost Generation, once remarked, the dissatisfaction of youth finds a continually renewed fund of causes and principles that define them.  In 1920, Cowley said, rebellious youth were Dadaists, in 1927 Surrealists, in 1932 proletarian writers, in the late 1940s Existentialists, and in the 1950s Beats.  To his list we can add that in the 1960s dissatisfied youth were part of the counterculture and New Left, in the 1970s the Me Generation, in the 1980s the yuppies of the Greed Generation, and in the 1990s Generation X.

What we mean when we refer to an intellectual generation, of course, is a group of people who are culturally important but demographically insignificant.  In the same way that an observer would have had to scour the North American countryside to find a Deist in the 1770s, an amusingly small number of people would have considered themselves members of a Lost Generation in the 1920s or the Beat Generation in the 1950s.  But because the cultural impact of those intellectual generations has been so important, it is still useful to talk about their legacy no matter how small their actual numbers.

There have been three major identifiable demographic generations in the past century: the Midcentury Generation, the Babyboom Generation, and Generation X.  For easy conceptualization, although it doesn’t fit the demographics precisely, we can talk of the Midcentury Generation being born between 1920 and 1940, the Babyboomers between 1940 and 1960, and Generation X between 1960 and 1980.  The problem with talking confidently about demographic generations, of course, is that it’s hard to believe that a Boomer born in 1958 shares more in common with a Boomer born in 1942 than with a member of Generation X born in 1961.

The Midcentury Generation (because they came to maturity in the at midcentury), born between World Wars I and II, is sometimes called the interwar generation, or the WWII generation, or occasionally the Depression generation or New Deal generation, and intermittently is also referred to as the affluent generation.  Many of this group fought in WWII or Korea, faced Hitler’s fascism and the Cold War, bought houses in the expanding 1950s suburbs, and experienced the rapid growth in income and production following WWII.

When the Depression of the 1930s turned into postwar prosperity in the mid-forties, the resulting increase of children was termed the Babyboom.  As children in the 1950s and 1960s, many Boomers enjoyed the suburban affluence.  But they also became disillusioned by the contradictions of the American Dream: that blacks and the poor were excluded, that much of the ethic of materialism was without spiritual values, and that the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War exposed much of the discrimination and hypocrisy of Cold War America.

As Boomers moved into middle age, and as national affluence in the early 1970s leveled off and then began to decline slowly, many of them became less idealistic about addressing the problems of society.  Called sellouts or yuppies by some and thirtysomethings by others, by the 1980s Boomers took control of government and business.  Some Boomers lived on antidepressants like Prozac, and talked during crunch time on their mobile phones or cell phones as they drove between edge cities in their sport utility vehicles (unlike the Midcentury generation who had driven station wagons).

Still, in middle age Boomers still carried with them words that echoed the 1960s drug culture, as when they got high, stoned, zoned, or were bummed (from a drug trip that was a bummer).  When a Boomer did very well at a task, without effort and in a groove, that person was in a zone or unconscious. Other words remained from the Vietnam era: a drunk or tired Boomer was trashed, wasted, blown, hammered, or bombed.  A fatigued or unalert Boomer was often described in words from the era of the early astronauts: spaced or spacey.

And some of the 1960s idealism remained with Boomers in middle age.  They became green, promoted recycling,  wanted to maintain biodiversity and ecological balance in the world, and worried about endangered species, global warming, and the greenhouse effect from depleted ozone. Some Boomer social concerns, such as racial equality, were pressed through legal channels that promoted affirmative action (some disparaged affirmative action as simply quotas) or redistricting legislative constituents.

Other Boomer issues were fought out in the late-century culture wars, staged mainly in the universities and by intellectuals in the media. In these battles the forces of tradition (disparaged as dead white male culture), often supported by the midcentury generation, fought the primarily Boomer postmodernists (pomos) who wielded the weapon of deconstructionism.  In the culture wars, the postmodernists were often allied with those promoting multiculturalism (an emphasis on diversity, ethnocentrism, and affirmative action), and the cultural conservatives accused them of following a strict line of what was considered by the cultural left to be politically correct or simply p.c.

In the late 1980s, Jeff Schesol, a cartoonist for the student newspaper at Brown University, created a comic strip called Politically Correct Man (or PC Man) in which a caped superhero revised people’s conservative speech and ideas.  Soon after this strip, a parody of the cultural left, was reported in the New York Times and Newsweek, the term politically correct sprang into use around the country.

In the late 1980s a new demographic generation, Generation X, began to be noticed.  The name was derived from a 1964 book, Generation X, by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson, who interviewed alienated British mods and rockers and let them speak for themselves.  (Perhaps the generation’s X was an echo of the Black Muslim practice of using an X as a last name, as in Malcolm X, to signify that they were not connected by heritage to a society that had oppressed them.)  The British boomer rock star Billy Idol saw the book and named his band after it.

Canadian public opinion pollster Allan Gregg, in the late 1980s, gave a speech on the new demographic group and tagged it with the name of Billy Idol’s former band.  Then Douglas Copeland, a young Canadian cartoonist and author, borrowed Gregg’s Generation X speech title and created for Vista, a business magazine, a comic strip based on his generation.  The strip featured young workers who were smarter than their Boomer bosses but caught in deadend jobs.  When Copeland published his novel Generation X in 1991, the image and name of his age group gained increasing recognition.

Alternative names for Generation Xers proliferated.  Some called them 13ers from the idea advanced by Boomers Neil Howe and William Strauss that Xers were the 13th generation since the states ratified the U.S. Constitution.  Less appreciated as names, because they were derivative and were invidious comparisons to the Boomers, were twentysomethings (a takeoff on thirtysomethings, a name for the Boomers in the 1980s) and babybusters or busters (because they were part of the smaller demographic generation following the babyboom).

Xers complained that they had faced a list of unique obstacles in life.  They had been raised in an age of divorce as latchkey kids who had to let themselves into empty houses after school while a single parent (often a working mother) toiled outside the home.  During adolescence, sex was no fun in the AIDS era of safe sex or protected sex.

Further, Xers objected to being the first generation in twentieth century America to face a worse economic future than their parents.  (Actually the downturn occurred in the early 1970s when the Boomers had left school and were looking for jobs.)  Previous generations, Xers protested, had left them with an increasing national debt to repay with their McJobs (deadend low level jobs as at McDonald’s).  Xers argued that they weren’t slackers, but couldn’t break into the market for good jobs held by Boomers.  In response, Boomers answered that the national debt had been produced to fight fascism, create the national highway system, and other causes from which Xers benefitted.  The New Deal, World War II, the space program, foreign aid and the Cold War, however ill-advised any of them might appear in retrospect, Boomers pointed out, were not hedonistic expenditures.

Yet the typical picture of Xers was unflattering and unwarranted.  In the national imagination, Xers skateboarded (started by boomers but perfected by Xers) or rollerbladed through life, had tried to live on their own but had boomeranged back home to live with parents, wore the booted, flannel-shirted grunge style adopted from the Pacific Northwest, watched a steady diet of music videos or Beavis and Butthead on MTV (punctuated by an occasional visit to Homer and Bart Simpson), worked as a temp or a temp worker in a job that was a no-brainer, or, worse, at a job where they asked “you want fries with that?” or “you want paper or plastic?”  The language of Generation X was portrayed as similarly bankrupt.  Asked a question, clueless Xers answered whatever (pronounced slowly as what-ever) and registered their disagreement with something by exclaiming as if!

From Boomer to Gen X culture, some terms evolved.  Consider the word rap.  In the Boomer counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, rapping meant to get together with someone in a meaningful talk (perhaps from rapport).  To Xers, rap was a form of music, a rhythmically chanted poetry set to music.  Or consider the evolution of the term like.  In the 1960s, Boomer hippies used like as a sort of prefatory punctuation in a comparison or statement: “It’s, like, really cool to see you here.”  “I’m, like, freezing.”  Xers use like as an introduction to what someone else said.  “My mom is like do you want to go to the store with me?  And I’m like, as if!”

Gen X grew up with and contributed to the hip-hop culture that began in the late 1970s.  Hip-hop began in African-American and hispanic communities in New York and Los Angeles, where followers listened to deejays perform scratch music, considered graffiti an expressive art, and breakdanced and moonwalked to hip-hop music.  When they were relaxing hip-hoppers were chillin’, and when they were excited and active they were kickin’ it.  When hip-hoppers had been insulted they had been dissed (from disrespected).  To greet or get someone’s attention, and sometimes to add an exclamatory punctuation in the middle of a sentence of trash-talking, hip-hoppers said yo! “Yo, man, where you been?”  “Hey, yo, man, get outta my face.”  Being “in my face” was being in my business, in my personal space, or on my case too closely.  “In your face,” was also part of the trash-talking basketball world when a player made a flashy move (like a dunk) that a nearby opposing player couldn’t stop.

Double-click here if you don’t know the impact of technology and computers on jargon in the last decades of the century.  The first computer nerds were Boomers, but it was Gen Xers who were the first to grow up computer literate as the Nintendo generation.  While most Boomers grew up listening to the Beach Boys singing about surfing in California, the youngest of the Gen Xers grew up surfing the Internet (following links to a progression of various websites) and dreaming about inhabiting a virtual reality (a computer-created experience that seems real but isn’t).

For those Boomers and Xers participating in the cyber generation, rebellion takes place in cyberspace (the websites, links, virtual reality, and communication areas that can be traveled through by interconnected computers).  Cyberpunks and computer hackers are techies proficient at traveling the Internet and finding their way into locations difficult to access, and who often get unauthorized admission to remote sites in cyberspace and pick up privileged information or material there.

More conventional are those open-collar workers who telecommute to their jobs from desktop or laptop computers in their home offices, logging on to the information superhighway or infobahn (from the German autobahn) to interact with the main office or do conferencing with others.  With cellphones, beepers, lap tops, faxes, voice mail, and e-mail, these people are wired.  At home in the evening, surfers of all ages, by clicking highlighted hypertext, follow links to what most interests them, often being led there by search engines, and end up in cybershopping sites, government information pages, cyberporn locations, or on webpages or homepages of individuals like themselves.

As the new century dawns the Midcentury demographic generation is dying out and the boomers are replacing them as grandparents. Although we have generally talked with respect about our elders, we have had several disparaging terms for them, especially only men.  Old codger meant a crotchety, stubborn, or eccentric man by 1756 (from cadger, a chronic borrower); old cock dates from 1835; old duffer was in use by 1875 (a duffer is a clumsy or dull-witted person); and old geezer dates from 1896 (from guiser, a sport, one who makes sport).  Old fogey was first used in the 1830s, but then meant an irritable old person rather than a staid one (from French fougue, quick-tempered).  A person who hadn’t accepted a new idea since Adam was a boy (1830s) was also known as a back number by 1882, while old fuddy-duddy became popular in the 1900s, coming from an English dialect word fud, the buttocks, hence a person who sits around on his duff doing nothing (the -duddy was added just to make the rhyme).  On the other hand, we have spoken affectionately of an old boy or old girl, meaning an old man or woman, since the 1840s; called an elderly person an oldster since 1848; and used old-timer as a somewhat complimentary term since the Civil War.

In our lifetime our concept and words about the elderly have changed greatly, because their number, life, and place in society have changed greatly.  Senior citizen has been a popular euphemism since the 1950s, when the number of older people suddenly seemed to have multiplied.  It had: in 1900 the average life expectancy was forty five, by 1950 the average life span was almost seventy years; the population had doubled but the number of people 65 and over had quadrupled to become 8 percent of the total.  Meanwhile, retirement had become a common concept, a dream open to all.  In 1920, two-thirds of the few men living past sixty-four years were still working, but by 1950 less than 25 percent of the men over sixty-four were working.  Such mass retirement had been made possible by the initiation of union, state, and insurance pensions of the 1920s, by Social Security in 1935, and by company pensions to attract employees during the boom years after World War II.  In the 1950s, for the first time, millions were reaching the age and pensions to become retirees, a new American group, and a new word to most.

But by now pensions themselves, the small houses built quickly after World War II, and new postwar life-styles had destroyed the extended family in which the elderly lived with their children and grandchildren.  People began talking about the new retirement houses in retirement villages and apartments for seniors where the elderly, according to the ads, could most happily spend their golden years.  Warm places without the rigors of winter and expenses of furnaces and overcoats, such as Saint Petersburg, Florida, Orange County in Southern California, and various specially built Sun Cities, were widely discussed.

Despite other pension plans, it was Social Security that made much of this talk possible.  Many elderly and rural people still call this the Social Security, harking back to an older way of speaking when the was used more than it is today (young people are also apt to talk about “the invention of cars” rather than “the invention of the car,” using plurals to avoid the).  The added the to Social Security also comes from the many arguments in 1934-35 comparing the Townsend Plan with the Social Security Plan.

During 1963-65 a new portmanteau, Medicare (Medical + care), was the topic of heated debate, finally becoming part of Social Security in 1965, even though members of the American Medical Association had lobbied against it as socialized medicine.  Medicare soon was joined by another new word, Medicaid, and eventually gave a new meaning to nursing home, as an institution for the old too sick or feeble to maintain their own home, while the once medical word geriatrics became known to us all.

Thus since the early 1950s we Americans have been talking about senior citizens, old age, and retirement a great deal and we have heard something else in America never generally heard before--the words, the wisdom and folly, the likes and dislikes, the joys and pains of people over sixty-five.  The voice of America now includes the voices of the old.

Speaking Freely: A Guided Tour of American English from Plymouth Rock to Silicon Valley by Stuart Berg Flexner and Anne H. Soukhanov. Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press via Copyright Clearance Center.