who names the generations? Why did we start using the phonetic alphabet? Why is it gonna be gen beta and not bravo?
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Lazy journalists and authors.
Coming up with a good name is one of the hardest parts of writing, especially one that “sticks” but I get so disappointed when people don’t even try.
You can say the earliest popular cohort names were misguided, but at least they were unique. The greatest generation, baby boomers, these tie in to widely understood historical events. Speaking as one, “millennial”, even though it’s constantly misused, is so much more meaningful than “Generation Y.”
If your point is that one generation is profoundly different and best described in opposition to the generation directly preceding it, that’s fine. But once you just start using the alphabet, how is that any better than just saying “Generation 1995-2015?”
My least favorite example of this laziness is “-gate” to denote a scandal. It might have been funny or original the first 10 or 100 times, but that was over 50 years ago. In a few decades when we’re all fighting each other in a desert hellscape for potable water, there’s going to be some scandal about a warlord hoarding a few million gallons and generation Gamma will refer to it as Water-gate and we’ll finally have come full circle.
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