Posted on 03/22/2004 10:16:29 AM PST by qam1
Hearing, "You don't look old enough to be a grandparent," is a little like being a good-looking corpse. Not the greatest compliment.
Baby boomers entering the grandparent years are launching a small semantic revolution to avoid the traditional label of senior citizen status. These youth cult boomers are demanding that their grandkids call them names with a younger sound than the traditional "grandma" and "grandpa."
"Baby boomers don't want to adhere to the blue-haired old granny stereotype. They are choosing young-sounding names for themselves because generally they don't think of themselves as grandparent age," says Norah Burch, 30, a self-described "name nerd" who has been tracking options for the new slew of first-time grandparents on her Web site, www.namenerds.com.
Burch's own mother decided that her grandchildren would call her "Moogie," the term for "mother" from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
"I don't have any problem, even for one second, being a grandmother. For me it's just the name," explained Laura Burch, who became a grandmother, at age 51, to Mikala, who is now 9 (followed by Jacob, 5, and Ari, 2).
Norah Burch says her mom, a potter who lives in Ithaca, N.Y., chose the unconventional name "because she associated `grandma' and `granny' et al with bingo playing and driving a giant Oldsmobile."
"My mom and her whole circle of friends, when they started having grandkids in their 50s, the thought of being called `grandma' was pretty awful to them. They weren't gray-haired old ladies sitting around in rocking chairs baking cookies."
One correspondent on namenerds.com writes, "My mom is your typical white middle-class suburban Southern Baptist Bible-thumpin' Dubya-suppportin' Texan. She has big, puffy, shellacked blond hair and wears T-shirts with three-dimensional objects hanging off them. She believes in Jesus Christ, the Republican Party, craft fairs and spiral perms. She has rebelled against Grandma because it sounds `old' and she's only 41."
She wants her grandkids to call her "Peaches." "She's even thinking of having a peach tattooed on her toe."
Flappers <1912
WWII 1912-1928
Silent Generation: 1929-1945.
Baby Boomers: 1946-1964.
Though often the later Baby Boomers born 1954 to 1964 are called Generation Jones (They are the ones who brought us Disco)
Generation X: 1965 to (1975 or 1982)
I have seen Generation X start at 1961 but the overwheming age given for the start is 1965. 1965 is the year the Baby Boom ended and birth rates rapidly declined. The end year for Xers is all over the place from 1975 to 1982
Generation Y (or the Echo Boom) starts from whatever year is picked for the end of the Xers to anywhere from 1994 to the present.
She never knew my children, having passed away long before they were born, but when I refer to her in front of them, I call her Grandmother Darling.
Flappers was one of the names given to UNMARRIED girls,who were in their late teens/20s, during the mid to late 1920s. They were also called "SHEBAS" and the guys "SHIEKS",during the craze for Rudolph Valentino's two movies," THE SHIEK" and "SON OF THE SHIEK", in the mid '20s.
That generation,usually people born in the late 1800s through the early years of 1900, were known as " THE LOST GENERATION ", because some of them were aimless, after returning from WW I;but not everyone was included in that name and it was F.Scot Fitzgerald who dubbed his pals with that nickname.
Those bought during 1941 -1946 are known as WAR BABIES. They aren't a part of the BOOMERS and were over shadowed and engulfed by them.
The SILENT GENERATION isn't a "generation" name at all.You're thinking of THE SILENT MAJORITY, which would include many different generations.
Late 1940/early 1950s female teens were called " BOBBYSOCKSERS ", much as their mothers' equivalent were called FLAPPERS. Neither of these names refer to an entire generation.
In England, in the 1920s-30s,20somethings, of the highest class, were called "BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS".
Giving a generation a name, is a new phenomena. The BOOMERS were really the FIRST .
My grandfather thought it was amusing when I used to call him "Old Timer." Actually, when I was about 9 or 10, I decided that I'd known the adults in my family long enough to call them by their first names. My mother was annoyed, my father didn't care, my grandmothers were shocked and my grandfather thought it was the funniest thing. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation
Progressive Generation 1843 to 1859.
Missionary Generation 1860 to 1882
Lost Generation 1883 - 1900
G.I. Generation 1901 to 1924.
Silent Generation 1925 to 1942
Baby Boomers 1946 to 1964
Generation X 1965 - 1981
Generation Y 1982 - 1996
I guess the 1943 - 1945 gap could be called the war babies though I would put them in with the Silents.
At least one more than there is in the Xers.
Strange list, which has NOTHING at all to do with what they were actually called at the time.This is revisionistic "history", made up recently.
I wouldn't call 1951 recently, From the link
"The name Silent Generation was coined in the November 5, 1951 cover story of Time to refer to the generation coming of age at the time".
I would question the start time of 1925 though, Someone born in 1925 would have been 18 in 1943 in which they could and would have fought in WWII.
TIME may have coined that term, in 1951, but it never stuck, no one else ever used it.And, no one called the earlier generations " PROGRESSIVE " or " MISSIONARY " at those times.
Being a WAR BABY, with a far better than average memory,who knew her grandparents and great grandmother, I can tell you from first hand knowledge, that this list is mostly garbage and historical revisionism.
Just because something is on the net, doesn't mean that it factual or true. :-)
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