JOIN USWhy wisecracking will never be witty
Just when you thought the year, inching to its end, couldn’t get more divisive on the interwebs, along came a catchphrase with instant meme potential that has, you guessed it, divided people on social media.
If you’ve been living under a rock, here is how it went. Chloe Swarbrick, a New Zealand Green Party MP, who was speaking in parliament, shut an (older) heckler down without missing a beat in her speech or losing her train of thought, by punctuating her address with an ‘Ok boomer’. She has since become the poster child for millennials, the woke generation that lets its validation be felt with shares, retweets and likes on social media.
For those not in the know: Millennials, also known as Generation Y (those born between early ‘80s to mid ‘90s), are the generation between Gen X (those born between mid ‘60s to early ‘80s), and Gen Z (those born after 1997). If that is a lot to wrap your head around, here’s a simpler explanation. Those who reached adulthood in the new millennium are millennials. Gen X is prior and much smarter (me), and Gen Z is still figuring things out as they are digital natives and are bombarded with more information than they will ever remember.
So, where does that leave poor baby boomers? Back in the dark ages, if the phrase is anything to go by. You know, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. So generational rifts are now no longer relegated to families and workplaces: it’s everywhere. Where it is most apparent is on the smartphone, that rectangular snooping device that fits in the palm of your hand but is so gargantuan in scope that it makes it all the easier to get het up about nothing at all in your sweet little echo chamber.
They say brevity is the soul of wit. Unfortunately, in millennial (and those that came after) parlance, they seem to have taken that a tad too literally. The best part? ‘Ok boomer’ is a borrowed phrase. Let that sink in. And where has it been borrowed, nay, co-opted from? From that great volcano where things spew quicker than you can say ‘spew’ and then subsequently go to die: social media. Its journey can be traced from 4Chan to Twitter to Reddit, or some such trajectory, which you have just read here now but will forget by tomorrow. Words like “grrl” (shudder), “pwn” (double shudder) and that most abominable abomination of all, “kewl”, are the last two generations’ contributions to the English lexicon.
My word.
Had I been Chloe Swarbrick, (and if I weren’t literate and erudite enough to do my own word play, that is) here is what I would have borrowed from those that came before me. What Dorothy Parker said she would like to have written on her epitaph: “Excuse my dust.” That’s the kind of catchphrase that merits memeification (new word. Want to bet it’ll find itself in the Oxford dictionary by next year?) Just think of it: someone older is needlessly heckling you and you want to shut him up with panache and flair. Which would you have gone with?
Until Gen Y and Gen Z motormouths can write a clean-as-a-whistle sentence like an Ismat Chughtai line, or a piece of verse that is bursting with lyricism like an Amrita Pritam verse , or a straight-from-the-hip quote, stripped bare of all inessential frippery, like a Dorothy Parker retort, boomers and Gen X will remain the generations that did it better. Here’s a piece of advice to those that came after me: instead of seeking inspiration from 4Chan forums, go to a library and pick up a book.
Because, as loath as I am to co-opt a song line that took criminal, unforgiveable liberty with grammar: Ok boomer don’t impress me much.