Skedaddle to Selfie by Allan Metcalf review – words that sum up your generation

What did ‘deadline’ originally mean? And if ‘sexting’ and ‘selfie’ are representative words for millennials, why is the new key word ‘wait’?

It is a great gift to the reviewer when a book’s author all but admits in the introduction that his whole project is horseshit. Props, then, to Allan Metcalf, whose Introduction introduces some caveats; and who then includes a subsection called “Some Caveats” introducing some more.

You can see why this was called for. The gimmick for this fun-sized contribution to the pop-etymology shelves is that it selects and glosses a handful of representative words for each generation. The generations in question are identified in (or implied by) William Strauss and Neil Howe’s books Generations (1990) and The Fourth Turning (1997). The Strauss/Howe theory is that US history moves in cycles of four generations, each cycle about 80 years long, before starting to repeat itself. You get a hero generation (eg the GI generation) then an artist generation (eg the silent generation) then a prophet generation (eg baby boomers) then a nomad generation (generation X), then you go back to hero (that’s you, millennials) and the whole thing starts again. “Whew,” says Metcalf. “Can you believe that? […] It’s like we’re being asked to believe in astrology.” The Sensible Reader will answer: “Whew indeed. Nope. Yup.”

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