Pylimitics

You’ve heard of “generation X.” It may or may not have come from a book, but a big reason everybody started using the term was Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It was a very popular book about both the present and the future, and included a glossary of all the terms he (and the gen-xers he portrayed) used. At least supposedly used. Since we now live deep in the future of that book, let’s see how well those terms have lasted. Here are my favorites:

Emotional Ketchup Burst: The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside oneself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends – most of whom thought things were fine.

Consensus Terrorism: The process that decides in-office attitudes and behavior.

Power Mist: The tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation.

Anti-Sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions.

Spectacularism: A fascination with extreme situations.

Lessness: A philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth: “I’ve given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho.”

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.”

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.”

Conspicuous Minimalism: A life-style tactic similar to Status Substitution. The non-ownership of material goods flaunted as a token of moral and intellectual superiority.

Café Minimalism: To espouse a philosophy of minimalism without actually putting into practice any of its tenets.

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.”

Personality Tithe: A price paid for becoming a couple: previously amusing human beings become boring: “Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we’re going to watch the shopping channel.”

Obscurism: The practice of peppering daily life with obscure references (forgotten films, dead TV stars, unpopular book, defunct countries, etc.) as a subliminal means of showcasing both one’s education and one’s wish to disassociate from the world of mass culture.

The score is not very high; as far as I can tell not a single one of those actually entered common usage. I’ve always suspected that Coupland just made some of them up.