Terms of The Generations
While in Dictionary.com’s app today I saw a promoted interest piece about what terms were coined within the GEN X lexicon. It was interesting to see and fun to see things like “to the max” or “chill pill” come back out. These are actually some things I have said to my little kids and it really amuses me to hear them repeat them back to me. Here’s a link to that slideshow:
But this got me thinking about some of the other generations and I started looking around for other generational terms and I came across this wonderful article from a UK publication, the Telegraph, where they called out some unique terms by generations all the way back to those born in 1822. they looked at American Slang and it is interesting to see what created some of the terms and why that generation started using them (e.g., skedaddle - a hasty and undignified retreat coined in Civil War battles like Bull Run).
So further down the rabbit hole I go and I wanted to understand a little more about how these “inspirational” generational labels were formed. I found this article on mentalfloss.com that walked through some of the ways that labels like Boomers, Generation X and Millennials were chosen to represent these broad swaths of our American and now GLOBAL generations…As you know, we aren’t a big fan of generational labels at Generation Bridge as they are often based more on marketing hype than on true demographic and psychographic insights. They are helpful when framed as age ranges to help understand where someone is at in their life and the likely challenges they face based on life stage challenges, but we also understand that life stage challenges often impact various generations as well so we always caution about painting a wide brush stroke when talking about intergenerational topics.
Essentially what you see in this article is exactly what we discussed above, that really some label gets traction in the media or the minds of people and then sticks. The baby boom fueled the boomer term, Generation X was likely fueled by pop culture participants like Billy Idol and then reinforced in the mainstream from a book by Douglas Coupland “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.” Once the media bought into the book and its premises the title took.
Now it seems like the success of these generational labels has fueled the desire to label the generation(s) earlier and get the media and people talking about them sooner - every new insight is the latest and greatest thing…Millennials, and now Generation Z / Post Millennials / Etc. are being diagnosed earlier and earlier in the process to uncover “brilliant” new “truths” to assign to ALL people born within a certain period of years across geographies and cultures…
OK - I went on a rantin’ again - sorry. But you can see where some of the terms came from here and how they gained popularity.
Free Tax Software For Qualifying Seniors
Many seniors may not realize that they qualify for free / no cost tax returns using certain software or online platforms. Rampino law in RI has a great newsletter that my mother shares with me, and even if you are not in RI, there are lots of good nuggets of information delivered monthly to help navigate a world of estate planning, and financial management that can be overwhelming as we get older.
That gets even more complicated when some of these platforms online intentionally hide the services so they are more difficult to find. In the article they say, “However, a report by ProPublica in April 2019 revealed that the software companies were making it difficult for customers to find the free tax filing software, including going so far as to hide it from a Google search. According to the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service, around 70 percent of taxpayers qualified for free filing, but only 1.6 percent used the free software in 2018. The IRS has now amended its agreement with the software industry to bar the companies from hiding the free products.”
Read more on their site:
photo credit: https://www.goodfreephotos.com
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