Biscuits and mayonnaise: A bunch of idiots get me to write about that damn word again
On July 21, a minor-league baseball team in Alabama lost a home game 7-5. Three weeks later, a Philadelphia-based magazine published a food column.
What do these events have in common? They're both incredibly insignificant, but they both drew wrath on Twitter because they made fun of people born between 1982 and 2002.
Yes, here I am again, complaining about the M-word.
If you haven't read the Philadelphia Magazine piece headlined How Millennials Killed Mayonnaise, don't. (We'll pause here because this headline is true garbage. The column doesn't explain How Millennials Killed Mayonnaise or even attempt to, largely because mayonnaise has not been killed.)
I could rip apart this long, stupid column, but I won't. (If you need that, The Guardian already came, saw and conquered courtesy of Adam Liaw.) The real question is: Who cares? Dumb stuff gets published on the internet every day and passes without any attention.
The Montgomery Biscuits - one of the OG gimmick-name minor-league baseball teams and the owners of one of my all-time favourite sports logos - made their contribution to the genre three weeks earlier with Millennial Night. The double-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays promised avocados, selfie stations and participation ribbons (surely baby boomers are the ones who came up with participation ribbons?!) during a game against the Mississippi Braves.
As stupid as the "journalism" of Philadelphia Magazine was, it has its place. It's something else that a company made a promotion out of stereotypes like this. You can't make fun of anybody based on their race, gender or social status, and you also can't make fun of anybody based on their age, unless they were born within the arbitrary span of 1982 to 2002.
But hold on - maybe the world isn't as willing to let a baseball team label a generation as you'd think. It's hard to put much stock in Twitter blow-back in 2018, but a team official said some of the sarcasm didn't come across when asked about the criticism.
This all poses another question: Why do people of this generation feel the need to pay this garbage any heed? I get that it's meant as irony. It's also wasting time on someone else's baseless generalizations, and it's further validation of that stupid word!
Much as we no longer have the benefit of time and the perhaps dubious role of the press as defenders of the language, we also no longer have the benefit of only being exposed to ideas in print that, by and large, have already been through careful consideration by the writer and scrutiny by an editor. Social media broke down barriers, including the good ones.
In the end, by turning two obscure, inconsequential events into talking points, the twitterverse has kept this nonsense current. What idiocy deserves isn't anger, it's indifference. People who had never heard of Philadelphia Magazine or the Montgomery Biscuits and worked themselves up into a public rage have ultimately rewarded these mistakes by giving the creators the attention they sought.
On that note, you can now follow me on Twitter. I can't promise it's worthwhile but I do keep the indignant rage to a minimum.
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