A pretty common trope is the crotchety old man who waves his cane at the kids in his neighborhood, yelling “You kids get off my lawn!” That gentleman is clearly suffering from ephebiphobia, which is fear of the young.
Although the syndrome is probably ancient, the word is quite new. It seems to have originated in 1993, in the article Beyond Ephebiphobia: Problem Adults or Problem Youths? published in Phi Beta Kappan. The word comes from the ancient Greek “ephebe”. The Greeks (and here I think they’re talking about Athenians in particular) had compulsory military service, and between the ages of 18 and 20, young men were required to serve in guard duty, and called “ephebes”.
The word arrived in English in the 1800s, but as “ephebic,” as in “My youngest born..doffing his ephebic robe.” It simply meant someone around the age of early adulthood. It was never widely used, though.
Even without the vocabulary, there have been countless examples of older folks railing against younger folks for a variety of reasons. Robert Louis Stevenson, in 1894, complained about the kind of umbrellas youngsters used: “Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his religious friends armed with the decent and reputable gingham. May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets ‘with a lie in their right hand’?” (Inappropriate umbrellas, yikes.)
In 1695, Robert Russel complained about what he observed in the streets: “I find by sad Experience how the Towns and Streets are filled with lewd wicked Children.”
In 1843, you can detect a similar sentiment in this speech by Anthony Ashley Cooper — people probably had to listen to him because he was, after all, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury: “a fearful multitude of untutored savages… [boys] with dogs at their heels and other evidence of dissolute habits…[girls who] drive coal-carts, ride astride upon horses, drink, swear, fight, smoke, whistle, and care for nobody…the morals of children are tenfold worse than formerly.”
And of course the same idea comes through from all the way back in 20 BCE, in this bit by Horace: “Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more
worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more
corrupt.”
Even earlier than that, Socrates got in on the game too: “Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders, and love chatter in
places of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
How is it possible that it took until 1993 for anybody to come up with a term for this?
