Millenni-Yuck: A (mostly futile) request to stop using an awful word
Language is a strange, fluid thing. As new concepts emerge, so too do new words, and as things take a greater priority in a society, language conforms around those things - consider how the word app is now understood to stand for application, as opposed to a mere decade ago, when it more commonly meant appetizer.
And as a language evolves, factions of its speakers rebel. This isn't a modern thing, of course: The use of the word garnishee as a verb seems quaint today, but it's illustrative of how a word can change, and then change back as the world requires it.
I consider myself somewhat laid back when it comes to the corruption of the English language, but there's one word that makes me ill whenever I see it: millennial. This is a bad thing, because the word is suddenly inescapable. But whenever I see it on the page or screen, I wince. Forming the syllables makes a bad taste in my mouth:
mill-enn-i-al.
So where did it come from, and why is it so consistently in use today? The second question is easy to answer: because the generation it refers to has come of age, and the world is reacting to it. The reason we use it is also obvious when you remember the world can't be bothered to come up with a name for our current decade or the one previous. It doesn't take long for a word to snowball when the subject is important and there are no available synonyms.
So, just where did millennial come from? The credit (or blame) seems to go to William Strauss and Neil Howe, the two historians and authors behind Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. By Strauss and Howe's strict definition, the birth of a millennial falls between 1982 and 2002. The authors aren't the caretakers of that generation or any other, but those who favour the term seem to agree more or less with the time frame. Perhaps the concept is hard to grasp though, as I've seen the definition stretched to include any young urbanite: see the Mother Jones story that claimed millennials were choosing not to settle in the suburbs in the 1990s, when even the very oldest millennials would be under 18.
The two coined the phrase in the early 1990s, so just why it caught on like wildfire in the middle of this decade isn't clear, except that it could be seen as filling a vacuum. At some point a couple of years ago, the phrase generation Y - also not a winner, I'll admit - began to be eroded by millennial. From there the transformation was quick: they went from appearing in tandem, to millennial appearing alone, to millennial appearing without accompanying definition in headlines (and constantly).
The swiftness of this adoption irks me. It seems any thought is justified so long as you include the word: as examples, The Atlantic's obnoxiously titled article "Millennials' Political Views Don't Make Any Sense" - a lowlight but by no means a lone offender - and a Toronto Life item that claimed sherry has gained a particular popularity with the generation. The things routinely said about millennials would not be sweepingly applied to any other group of people, because they would be seen as prejudicial or even ridiculous. But the clinging stench of slander isn't the only reason I'm sick the frustratingly de rigueur millennial:
1) The word is too long
Pluralized, it's 11 letters long! This might seem arbitrary, or at least it might to anyone who has never written a headline. Comparing with the two preceding (and indisputably named) generations, one could argue the word is shorter than the terms baby boomer or generation X, and they'd be right. However, members of those generations are known by sharp, concise short forms: We call them boomers and gen-Xers.
So for the word millennial to truly attain the currency of baby boomer or generation X, it needs to acquire an unambiguous nickname. But what? Mills won't do. I can't see some abbreviation of the middle or end of the word working: Lennies and ials (eels?) look contrived and don't mean much as spoken words. The best guess for a millennial short form I can come up with is Ms. I like the vaguely texting-inspired feel of it, and the synergy with the roman numeral. However, this absolutely flunks the ambiguity test. Should Ms appear in a headline, what would it refer to? Millions? The Seattle Mariners? M&Ms? Even in a world of constant autocorrect, people are much too lazy to abide a word as long as millennial.
2) The word does not describe its subject
The phrase baby boomers is descriptive and accurate: There was an explosion of births, and that event was influential in the lives of those of that generation.
Generation X is less apt, but still descriptive: the group is in fact a generation, and while the letter X was assigned as a placeholder long before gen-Xers had their day, it expresses the feelings associated with that generation of being ignored as the group sandwiched between two larger generations. That X-rated edginess may not have been earned (I'd argue that supposed millennial calling card of entitlement is no more specific to the worst of that generation), but it fits the narrative of understandable resentment of a life lived in the shadow of the boomers.
Meanwhile, as anyone who lived through Y2K and the turn of the millennium can tell you, the supposed millennial leap was something of a non-event. Why, then, more than a decade after the yawn that was the dawn of the new millennium, are we telling millions of people that, whether they like it or not, this was their defining moment? Further, if there is little relevance in the turn of the millennium to someone born in 1982, a young adult when the calendar flipped from 1999 to 2000, the event is clearly irrelevant to someone born in 2002, at the end of the generation according to Strauss and Howe.
Unquestionably the single most important event for this generation in the West is 9/11, both as a singular event and as a watershed moment in politics, the media and elsewhere. While the temptation might be to pick the rise of the Internet as the highlight of this generation, note the dot-com crash happened before some so-called millennials were born. Gen X may be the MTV generation, but it is also the generation that pioneered the Internet, and on its youngest fringe the first generation to grow up online. Regardless, the influence of the Internet is not an asset to the techy millennial label. The birth of the Internet is no more a product of the turn of the millennium than the rise of the automobile was a product of the turn of the 20th century.
3) The word is not specific to this generational use
Neither baby boomers nor generation X were established phrases before they were first used to describe their respective generation. The word millennial, however, existed long before 1982, and in fact long before Strauss and Howe themselves.
The Google Books Ngram Viewer spells this out pretty plainly: The word millennial might be a buzzword now, but it was in fact an even bigger buzzword long ago. In the latter part of the 19th century, millennialism - the idea that the Second Coming would line up with the end of the 20th century - was popular enough that the word millennial found its way into print more than it did at the turn of the millennium itself.
(A note of explanation about the graph: The dates are between 1500 and 2008 because that's all the viewer can pull from. I've also used the phrase baby boom because it shows the largest spike. The word boomer is in lesser use but is driving clearly upward at the end of the graph, while baby boomer follows a line similar to generation X, but stronger and with a more pronounced bump. Gen X and gen-X trend similar to generation X, but are in less common usage. Gen Xer and Gen-Xer don't appear at all. I don't want to clutter this article with redundant data but if you're curious, take a peek for yourself.)
Thus we see the issue with using a regular word to refer to a group of people: It has other meanings, and had other meanings before they were here, and will have other meanings again when they are gone. There's nothing wrong with this in theory, but it's a mark against the word as far as I'm concerned. Besides, if other groups of people can get cool labels, like generation X or boomers or the greatest generation - Who doesn't want to be part of the greatest generation? - why give millennials the short end of the stick?
So now the question comes: If not millennials, then what? I'm personally partial to a word that once upon a time appeared a consensus third choice: the boomerang generation. This fails on the third point (boomerangs, by which I mean the throwing sticks, preceded the generation) but it succeeds on the second: the population bulge we see with this generation mimics that of their parents, the boomers. Further, there's a secondary meaning: A surplus of the generation left their parents' homes in early adulthood, only to return amid poor career prospects. More than surviving Y2K, this is the hallmark of the generation: Their careers were young when the economy went sideways in 2008, and the delayed retirement of baby boomers left them on the outside of a tough labour market.
So what about the first criterion? Boomerang is only barely shorter than millennial, true, but the prospects for abbreviation are better. You can't call them rangers, because in the written word it looks too much like the name of a hockey team or a Texas police force. But how about boomies? (This is inspired by the Star Trek trekker-trekkie split, I fully admit.) Or how about boos? That seems fair, as a group that grew up on a steady diet of 9/11 and the Great Recession has a lot to be afraid of.
Maybe boomerang really isn't the right word. And maybe 10 years from now, we'll look at millennial as just another dead buzzword. But until that happens, I'm open to any and every alternative to the word - just so long as it's not something else that makes me sick to my stomach.
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