oh perhaps i've done this a time or two before, but it strikes me that people may forget my stunning insights over time, or a new little knot of readers might have gathered. but anyway, this thing about generations - boomers, xers, yers, millennials, or whatever - is just slop. people reproduce continuously, not all at once every twenty years (though we might think about a law enforcing the latter, in order to help columnists write cultural trend pieces imitating other columnists' cultural trend pieces). you could start and stop generations anywhere you like, and we should try a re-jigger if only to get people to stop using these unmeaning yet profoundly annoying terms.