Wiregrass Seniors Magazine May 2018 MAY ISSUE | Page 12

Page 12 WiregrassSeniorsMagazine.com OLE SOUTH TREE SERVICE License, Bonded, & Insured TRIM TOPPING FIREWOOD TREE REMOVAL STUMP GRINDING BOBCAT WORK No Job too Small Senior Discounts 24hr Emer vice F Fr r ee Estma tes Emerg g enc ency y Ser Service Estmates 334-701-3538 Ethel and Earl Heavy snow had buried the car in Ethel and Earl’s driveway. Earl dug around the wheels for an hour. Then he explained to Ethel that once the van starts moving good, do not stop until you get where you are going. Then he got behind the van and they proceeded to rock it back and forth, until finally, it was free and Ethel was on her way. As Earl walked back into the house, the phone was ringing. He answered and a frantic Ethel said, “Thank goodness you answered, There’s is an alarming sound coming from under the van right now and for a moment, I thought I was dragging you down the highway!” Earl yelled into the phone “And you haven’t stopped YET?” How Do Generations Get Their Names? We all know what a Millennial is. There are stereo- types about what Millennials do and do not like, how lazy they may or may not be, and how often they check their Twitter feeds—all because we're comfortable using this single term to refer to an entire age demo- graphic of the population. Millennial is a powerful word, and not because of the age group it refers to, but because of just how useful it is—just like Gen X or Baby Boomer. There is no single or even typical way that genera- tions historically get their names, because lumping everyone who's roughly the same age together is a relatively new phenomenon. According to Peter Francese, a demographic and consumer markets expert, Baby Boomers were the first named generation to exist. (Those that came ear- lier, like The Greatest Generation that fought in World War II, were named retroactively.) It all started when the Census Bureau referred to the years between 1946 and 1964, during which birthrates rocketed up from around 3 million a year to over 4 million a year, as the "Post War Baby Boom." As the kids born in this boom started to grow into adults (and thus, con- sumers), ad agencies found traction by marketing their products to so-called Baby Boomers. This would be the first (and so far last) time a generation's "official" name would come from a government organization. Eventually—as will inevitably happen to all of us, even the most maturity-challenged Millennials—the Baby Boomers got older and thus less appealing to com- panies with something to sell. The ad agencies wanted another catch-all term for the new members of their target age group and began shopping around different terms. "They throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks," Francese says. "And in some of the meetings, they don’t stick." That's how Generation Y, a proto-term for Millennials, went in and out of fashion. "Genera- tion Y was too difficult to say, too hard to brand, it didn’t have the cachet, it didn’t have the spark of Millennials," Francese says. Not sticking is a matter of whether or not media or- ganizations start using the term. As for determining the dates for Millennials, it all came down to