I have been on the verge of asking that, @ragingloli. I gather it means young people, and would make some sense if it meant, say, people born in the current millennium. However it mostly seems to be used in US pop culture and forum trash talk as a slur against current “young whippersnappers”, to discredit and disrespect them, and to look for agreement about disliking them or against things they supposedly like. I especially noticed a spike of it last year in attempts to discredit Bernie Sanders (cuz all his supporters are millennials hur dur).
Let’s Google it. Oh, no, now I wish I hadn’t! Wikipedia has:
“Millennials (also known as Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates for when this cohort starts or ends; demographers and researchers typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years. Millennials, who are generally the children of baby boomers and older Gen Xers, are sometimes referred to as “Echo Boomers” due to a major surge in birth rates in the 1980s and 1990s.”
Sigh. Now I hate modern pop culture even more. Gen X? Gen Y? No precise dates? 1980s? How devoid of meaning can we get?
Ah, it goes on to name some people responsible:
“Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe are widely credited with naming the Millennials.[1] They coined the term in 1987, around the time children born in 1982 were entering preschool, and the media were first identifying their prospective link to the new millennium as the high school graduating class of 2000.[2] They wrote about the cohort in their books Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (1991)[3] and Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000).[2]”
“In August 1993, an Ad Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe those who were aged 11 or younger as well as the teenagers of the upcoming ten years who were defined as different from Generation X.[4][5] According to Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age “threw in the towel by conceding that Millennials is a better name than Gen Y”,[1] and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age said to NPR “the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them”.[6] Millennials are sometimes called Echo Boomers,[7] due to them being the offspring of the baby boomers and due to the significant increase in birth rates from the early 1980s to mid 1990s, mirroring that of their parents. In the United States, birth rates peaked in August 1990[8][9] and a 20th-century trend toward smaller families in developed countries continued.[10][11] In his book The Lucky Few: Between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom, author Elwood Carlson called this cohort the “New Boomers”.[12]”
“Psychologist Jean Twenge described Millennials as “Generation Me” in her 2006 book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before, which was updated in 2014.[13][14] In 2013, Time magazine ran a cover story titled Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation.[15] Newsweek used the term Generation 9/11 to refer to young people who were between the ages of 10 and 20 years during the terrorist acts of 11 September 2001. The first reference to “Generation 9/11” was made in the cover story of the 12 November 2001 issue of Newsweek.[16] Alternative names for this group proposed include Generation We,[17] Global Generation, Generation Next[18] and the Net Generation.[19]”
So at least we know whom to add to the assassins’ hit list. ;-)
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