who names the generations? Why did we start using the phonetic alphabet? Why is it gonna be gen beta and not bravo?
In: Other
Why beta instead of bravo? Beta is the next character in the Greek alphabet, which is used instead of the phonetic alphabet.
Naming generations is relatively new, and there isn’t a group that names a generation; the names mostly come about due to consensus amongst influential organisations. You can also see that some generations get pretty hazy around the years included in that generation.
Douglas Coupland wrote a book called Generation X about his specific generation and the naming convention stuck.
Millennials were probably the exception because they were born near the turn of the millennium.
No one officially names generations, they’re just names that get adopted for whatever cultural reason and once enough people use them, they become unofficially official.
Like millennials were called “gen Y” before the name millennial caught on. Gen X got named Gen X because at the time “X” was just a letter than someone came up with in the 9s when X represented something “unknown or undefined” which for the generation of punk rock and what not, makes sense.
Boomers are called Boomers because they were born during the post world war 2 baby boom.
After millennials came gen Z, which now people are calling “Zoomers”. Which personally I think will stick.
Now what did we go for the Greek Alpha and Beta as opposed to NATO Phonetic Alpha and Bravo? Again Jo one officially decided, my bet is just that more people are familiar with the Greek letters than NATO phonetics.
So, generation names are basically decided socially.
The greatest generation fought ww2, and gave birth to the (baby )boomers who were born in the postwar baby boom. The silent generation sits between them, forgotten by all. Gen X followed, and settled on gen X as their title pretty much as an expression of 90s eXtra kool factor, and because they were X, gen y followed.
Gen y started becoming a cultural force in the 2000s, the new millennium, which lead to millennial winning out over gen y, but gen y lasted long enough to spawn gen z, and since we’ve reached the end of the alphabet, we go back to gen a and carry on.
Why beta? Because most people don’t know the phonetic alphabet, and think of “alpha” being followed by “beta” in the Greek tradition.
It’s quite likely that gen alpha or gen beta will aquire a new, distinctive name once they get old enough to have cultural weight
People have explained where these names come from, but I think it’s important to say that the concept of separating and naming these generational groups is pretty new.
The post-WWII “baby boom” created a whole lot of new people, kind of all at once. So Baby Boomers actually are a group with some real-world meaning. All the other generations are essentially arbitrary divisions that people can’t even really agree on. I mean, people have complained about “kids these days” and cultural age gaps forever, but I think the Baby Boom is what got us talking in terms of named generations like this.
Edit: also, maybe, the rise of the internet separated old from young pretty severely. Old folks famously have a harder time figuring out emerging tech, so the 90s might have created a pretty sharp cultural divide between people young enough to run with it (dubbed Generation X because it sounded futuristic) and the people too old for it. I definitely think everything after that is just putting names to arbitrary age ranges
All naming and words are based what society mostly calls it . There is no set rules and no higher power that set what things means.
It’s like when someone says that not a word because it’s not in the dictionary . If everyone uses a certain word the same way , it doesn’t really matter if it’s not in a written dictionary, that word will still exist the way people use it
I think the Greek alphabet is used more widely because it has been used for thousands of years, while the phonetic alphabet was invented more recently for talking over the radio. The seemingly random words were picked for clarity, the same way you sometimes hear people say “niner” in military movies to differentiate nine from five. I’ve never seen it used for indexing outside of the military, or people trying to act military.
[removed]
There was an actual Baby Boom.
The rest are just vibes and we’re all still living in Baby Boomers’ shadow.
For example, Millennials used to be everyone born at the end of the Millennium. That changed a few years ago, so some people (those born in the very late 90s) have existed as part of two generations.
Years ago (over 10ya) I looked up where the generation names came from, I guess it was some Wikipedia page saying these names were created by some big marketing agency.
They were looking for ways to split the population into groups, so they could plan where to spend money and get the best results, according to the product and target group.
Obvious groups would be gender, location, education, salary… And age. Hence they divided the population into age groups and named each group. This took place in the 70s, so it was likely older boomers running it. They named their grandpa’s the greatest generation, their parents the silent, themselves baby boomers, and the kids of the time were named generation X, as in X is the unknown in math. To be defined.
Nothing big happened to name generation X, so the name stayed. The next generation was named Y because that’s what comes after X. So is Z.
Out of Latin alphabet letters, someone had the idea to use the Greek alphabet, not the phonetic. I have no idea who or why greek letters.
The theory behind social generations is that people who come of age roughly in the same years have a unique view of the world.
I’m xenial, late X. I find it difficult to connect to people as old as older X or younger millennials, and that’s not a lot of difference – the world just changed fast enough for the experience growing up be very different.
Also, these names and dates they refer to are western centric, they don’t make much sense for most of the world.
Latest Answers