WotY (not!): Grups

[David Bowie]

Having just waded into the debate over the point of the WotY, here's an
early nomination for...well, not for the WotY. Least likely to succeed,
maybe? Stupidest use of a Star Trek term in a newspaper article of the
year, in any event, at least as far as i've seen.

A widely report in the newspapers (i saw it in the Orlando Sentinel some
days ago; it seems to have started at the New York Magazine[1], but if
you google 'grups newspaper' you'll find gobs and tons of articles on
it) reported on the emergence of "grups"--Gen-Xers who are now in their
30s and 40s but still party like folk in their 20s. The word was
borrowed from a Star Trek episode featuring a world where all the adults
had died off, and the savage children referred to the adult Star Trek
crew as "grups".

281,000 Google hits for "grups" on English pages, so it's not an unknown
term (though scanning the results it appears that some of those are
French pages that are miscategorized as English), but *this* Gen-Xer
hadn't heard of the term before, and I tend to be pretty up with all the
slang Connie Eble reports on each year. (Maybe i'm only familiar with
current college slang. Who knows?)

Alternative labels for the group include yupsters and alterna-yuppies. I
don't think grups is gonna make it, though--speaking purely as a Gen-Xer
here, a label from Star Trek isn't gonna fly. Star *Wars*, maybe, but
even if "grups" *was* borrowed by a Gen-X writer, Star Trek is so, well,
*old*...[2]

[1] See http://nymag.com/news/features/16529/

[2] I'm not the only one who's grumpy about the term:
http://daddytypes.com/archive/2006/03/28/once_upon_a_time_there_was_a_magazine_writer.php

--
David Bowie                                         http://pmpkn.net/lx
     Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
     house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
     chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.

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