AARP Eye Center
Who Are You Callin' a Boomer?
By Charlotte Marshall, August 19, 2010 01:53 PM
Check out this awesomely honest piece by Joe Queenan at AARP about why the term baby boomer is actually a pretty offensive term, and his call for folks to let the word go:
It is not a nickname; it is an epithet. It takes a generation that thinks of itself as being perpetually youthful and turns them into pre-geriatric toddlers. And while the term "baby boomer" may mean different things to different people, all of them are horrible.
To the millennials, it conjures up tragic images of parrotheads in belted shorts and Hawaiian shirts, or of women who attend outdoor music festivals in oversized denim overhauls and tie-dyed T-shirts and who are themselves married to their third parrothead. To everyone else, the term captures the inextinguishably juvenile personality of the boomer. The boomer is the permanent child, the eternal Mork. The generation whose pantheon of heroes once ranged from Jimi Hendrix to Jim Morrison to Jimmy Page now finds its spokesperson and ceremonial icon in bald, bland, bathetic James Taylor. This is not the way things were supposed to turn out.
Read the rest here.