Author’s Note: Due to my advanced age, I am late in detecting several ripples in the American media space-time fabric. They involve words that I thought I understood but apparently did not. Here are three.
– Marlow
Squad
Being aware of modern young uns approach to language, I first thought it might be the past tense of “squid.”
Just in case you live in a cave in the Rockies without WiFi, a phone landline or cable — the phrase “The Squad” has emerged as a shorthand to represent four newly elected in 2018 women of color: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar — all members of the Democratic Party.
Once aware of what the phrase was about, I was initially inclined to fix the blame for this term’s creation squarely on those who self-named their membership last fall. I soon discovered we have to thank a Saturday Night Live skit with Taylor Swift five or so years ago for nationalizing it. Further research indicates its cultural appropriation as a meme from the inner-city Atlanta Georgia hip hop scene of trap music back in the early 2000s.
But not so fast, my woke frenz. Let’s walk it back a bit more to the sports worlds of basketball squads, soccer squads, football squads, track squads and so on. They in term indeed borrowed it from American military usage as in the smallest coherent tactical unit of about 8 folks or so. More pre-woke appropriation times two.
Unfortunately my linguistics training/OCD led me to unearth the term’s first use back in a 17th century Spanish military term “tercio” – it’s fair dinkum justice that none of us would have expected such – just like the Inquisition.
Further obsessing over this for other, far less interesting meanings and sources would lead us to absorb way too much more news.
Are we confused yet?
Makes me long for quaint times of the “freedom caucus,” “young guns,” “posse,” or the then hip TV show “Mod Squad.” Or not except for the Mod Squad.
This brings me to the next word (or is it a meme? Trope? Whatever.) . . .
Millennial
Online dictionaries tell me that this is a generational grouping of folks born between the years 1983 and 1996 or so. Some call it Gen Y. Most of us older types and some of its own members have taken to lampooning them – blaming them for all sorts of things – not voting, too much student/credit card debt, yo-yo’ing back to their parent’s homes, entitled, not quite launched into life and so on.
Except for the not voting, it’s a bad rap.
Which brings me to a self-imposed term they and their younger iGen cohort have recently memed them with . . .
Snake People
Here’re some salient features of this group that I found (yes, on the internet) – don’t buy cars or houses, communicate primarily through text heavy with emoji’s, periodically congregate at EDM “concerts,” and have difficulty looking someone in the eye when talking to them. Would rather hang out with friends than invest their free time in their 20’s on a worthwhile career and most disappointingly, they listen to music that sounds like two computers having sex.
An older friend has used a Chrome browser plugin that replaces every instance of “Millennial” with “Snake People.” He finds it hilarious.
As a bonus for sticking with this fluff piece so far, I offer you hardy few a bonus word:
Progressive
To offer an olive branch to those left leaning Gen Xers and Millennials who will likely be looking after me and W in our Depends dotages, I found this non-trigger meaning of this term in the Urban Dictionary: an event in which several people have to drink all the alcohol at a certain locale before going to some other location to drink up all available of the adult beverages before again moving on. Lather, rinse, repeat until they arrive at the final destination. Most people end up puking or passing out, but the few who make it to the goal destination are treated like gods.
Sounds like a pre-Uber pub crawl without the worship part, but whatever . . .
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