Les Jones

Word of the Day > Word of the Day: Neologisms from Douglas Coupland's "Generation X"

Wonderfully entertaining book. I need to read it again to decide if it's art of just trashy fun. The only one of these terms that went into widespread use was McJob. Via Wikiquote:

• café minimalism - to espouse a philosophy of minimalism without actually putting into practice any of its tenets. (page 107)
• decade blending - in clothing: the indiscriminate combination of two or more items from various decades to create a personal mood: Sheila = Mary Quant earrings (1960s) + cork wedgie platform shoes (1970s) + black leather jacket (1950s and 1980s). (page 15)
• down-nesting - the tendency of parents to move to smaller, guest-room-free houses after the children have moved away so as to avoid children aged 20 to 30 who have boomeranged home. (page 144)
• dumpster clocking - the tendency when looking at objects to guesstimate the amount of time they will take to eventually decompose: "Ski boots are the worst. Solid plastic. They'll be around till the sun goes supernova." (page 162)
• earth tones - a youthful subgroup interested in vegetarianism, tie-dyed outfits, mild recreational drugs, and good stereo equipment. Earnest, frequently lacking in humor. (page 26)
• expatriate solipsism - when arriving in a foreign travel destination one had hoped was undiscovered, only to find many people just like oneself; the peeved refusal to talk to said people because they have ruined one's elitist travel fantasy. (page 172)
• fame-induced apathy - the attitude that no activity is worth pursuing unless one can become very famous pursuing it. Fame-induced apathy mimics laziness, but its roots are much deeper. (page 150)
• green division - to know the difference between envy and jealousy. (page 150)
• historical slumming - the act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villages — locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back — so as to experience relief when one returns back to "the present". (page 11)
• knee-jerk irony - the tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation. (page 150)
• McJob - a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one. (page 5)
• me-ism - a search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes. (page 126)
• mid-twenties breakdown - a period of mental collapse occuring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage. (page 27)
• musical hairsplitting - the act of classifying music and musicians into pathologically picayune categories: "The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska." (page 85)
• nutritional slumming - food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from a complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals, and packaging semiotics: Katie and I bought this tub of Multi-Whip instead of real whip cream because we thought petroleum distillate whip topping seemed like the sort of food that air force wives stationed in Pensacola back in the early sixties would feed their husbands to celebrate a career promotion. (page 120)
• occupational slumming - taking a job well beneath one's skill or education level as a means of retreat from adult responsibilities and/or avoiding possible failure in one's true occupation. (page 113)
• o'propriation - the inclusion of advertising, packaging, and entertainment jargon from earlier eras in everyday speech for ironic and/or comic effect: "Kathleen's Favorite Dead Celebrity party was tons o' fun" or "Dave really thinks of himself as a zany, nutty, wacky, and madcap guy, doesn't he?" (page 107)
• option paralysis - the tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none. (page 139)
• Squires - the most common X generation subgroup and the only subgroup given to breeding. Squires exist almost exclusively in couples and are recognizable by their frantic attempts to recreate a semblance of Eisenhower-era plenitude in their daily lives in the face of exorbitant housing prices and two-job life-styles. Squires tend to be continually exhausted from their voraciously acquisitive pursuit of furniture and knickknacks. (page 135)
• status substitution - using an object with intellectual or fashionable cachet to substitute for an object that is merely pricey: "Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother's BMW." (page 54)
• survivulousness - the tendency to visualize oneself enjoying being the last remaining person on earth: "I'd take a helicopter up and throw microwave ovens down on the Taco Bell." (page 62)
• tele-parablizing - morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots: "That's just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses!" (page 120)
• underdogging - the tendency to almost invariably side with the underdog in a given situation. The consumer expression of this trait is the purchasing of less successful, "sad", or failing products: "I know these Vienna franks are heart failure on a stick, but they were so sad looking up against all the other yuppie food items that I just had to buy them." (page 137)
• virgin runway - a travel destination chosen in the hopes that no one else has chosen it. (page 172)

See also:
- Word of the Day: Vaccination Time Travel

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