Beat and Boomer Gen Xrs?

To add further fuel to the debate on what is Gen X, Gen Y, etc, I'll share something I just found a few days ago. Turns out that the earliest (that I've found) usage of the term Gen X was applied to teenagers in 1952! Below is the article from Word origins.com with a second origins article from Wikipedia.

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From Word Origins.com http://www.wordorigins.org/Words/LetterG/generationx.html

Generation X
The term Generation X is much older than those that are usually assumed to belong to it. Generation X is a lost or disaffected cohort of youths; the X is a reference to the algebraic term for an unknown quantity. In recent years it has been applied to those coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, the children of the Baby Boomers, although the term is much older than this generation.

It dates to 1952 and originally applied to the youth of that period. From Holiday magazine of December of that year:

What, you may well ask, is Generation X?. . . These are the youngsters who have seen and felt the agonies of the past two decades . . . , who are trying to keep their balance in the swirling pressures of today, and who will have the biggest say in the course of history for the next 50 years.

Usage in reference to the post-Baby Boom generation dates to at least 1989, when the Toronto Star of 24 February had this to say:

What if this Generation X turns around collectively and comes to the conclusion they can't sit around waiting, and instead . . . start their own businesses.
That same article coined the term Generation Xer for a member of Generation X:

The other possibility . . . is that the Generation X-ers will cope by changing their goals or changing their behavior.
Credit for the coinage of Generation X is often mistakenly given to Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel of that title, but while Coupland did much to popularize the term, he did not coin it.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, New Edition)



Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

The history of the term
The term was first used in a 1964 study of British youth by Jane Deverson. Initially, Deverson was asked by the editor of the magazine Woman's Own to conduct a series of interviews with teenagers of the time. The study revealed teenagers who "sleep together before they are married, don't believe in God, dislike the Queen and don't respect parents", which was deemed unsuitable for the magazine because it was a new phenomenon. Deverson, in an attempt to save her research, worked with Hollywood correspondent Charles Hamblett to create a book about the study. Hamblett decided to name it Generation X.
In 1976, the phrase was picked up as the name of a punk rock band featuring Billy Idol, which released three albums before disbanding in 1981. However the term Generation X was used to describe the early British punks more generally with their nihilism, rejection of earlier generations' values and the feeling that they were a lost generation that meant nothing to society, and vice versa. The term Generation X was later popularized in 1991 when Douglas Coupland's popular novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture was published. Coupland took the X from Paul Fussell's 1983 book Class, where the term "class Y" designated a region of America's social hierarchy, rather than a generation. However, this term has transcended its roots in that country and expanded into other areas of the West.
Coupland first wrote of Generation X in September, 1987 (Vancouver magazine, "Generation X", pp. 164-169, 194: see illustrations below), which was a precursor to the novel and slightly preceded the term "twentysomething". The main character Kevin, 25, is a Canadian "trailing edge" baby boomer who denies cohort affiliation with his older sister, 34, and friends, all boomers. Kevin and his cohorts are all over-educated, under-employed, and pay skyrocketing living expenses, which forces some to move back home to live with their parents (that is, boomerang). Unlike boomers, they were too young to march for peace (Vietnam protests ended with the draft in 1973 with protestors typically aged 16-25) and either were not born or were too young to recall Kennedy's assassination in 1963 (long term memory starting at age 5). Coupland referred to those born from 1958 to 1966 in Canada, or 1958 to 1964 in the United States. As the term Generation X later became somewhat interchangeable with "twentysomething", he later revised his notion of Generation X to include anyone considered as "twentysomething" in the years 1987 to 1991.
Usage