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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Why not Bravo? Cuz they did not earn the praise yet!
… I’ll show myself out.
Total guess, but when the Weather Meteorological Organization runs through their list of names for tropical storms (which run alphabetically), they don’t wrap back around to A, but move on to naming them after the Greek alphabet (see 2005 in the Atlantic as an example). Someone may have had the idea to do the same a tentative names for the post-Z generations.
Millennials were originally Generation Y, or the super clever Generation Why. The media comes up with this stuff, sometimes it sticks and others it doesn’t.
For anyone mildly interested in this topic, check out the book “The Fourth Turning” by Howe and Strauss.
Googling generation names provides following names with some of their characteristics. Other answers already talk about how the names came about.
Lost – 1883-1900 – young adults during ww1
Greatest – 1900-25 – adults during ww2
Silent – 28-45 – Children of great depression and ww2
Baby boomers – 46-64 – Saw prosperity post ww2
X – 65-80 – Grew up when tech was advancing
Millennials/Y – 81-96 – old enough to see turn of the century
Z – 1997-2012
Alpha – 2010-24
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.
Just a guess here now, but follow along. The folks who named themselves “the Greatest generation”
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