What Shall We Call the Recession Generation?

In 1951 Time magazine declared that the young people who were born during the Great Depression, then in their teens and early twenties, "lacked flame" and were "docile notetakers." Growing up during hard times had made them cautious and prone to conformity. Their cohort, which produced more than a dozen White House chiefs of staff and not a single U.S. president, was dubbed the Silent Generation.

Which makes one wonder: What will the children of the current recession be called?

"Generation OMG" is the New York Times's catchy nomination. It's the headline on an article that asks:

So what of the youth shaped by what some are already calling the Great Recession? Will a publication looking back from 2030 damn them with such faint praise? Will they marry younger, be satisfied with stable but less exciting jobs? Will their children mock them for reusing tea bags and counting pennies as if this paycheck were the last? At the very least, they will reckon with tremendous instability, just as their Depression forebears did.

Before the current downturn, some pundits were referring to the children born after 1999 as "Generation Z." The Times notes that when Neil Howe, author of several books about generational issues, ran a contest to name this generation, the winner was "Homelanders," as in security. (The findings were reported in the July 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review.)

What do you think? Z, OMG, Homelanders, or something else?

UPDATE: Via Twitter, Meg suggests Recessive Gen, which gets points for wordplay and nerdiness.

Comments

[michael]

i'm thinking generation YOY

[Duchesse]

OMG is a little dated for them, isn't it?

Maybe Re-De's (REvisting the DEpression) or the Unentitled?

[pam]

If we adopt Generation Z, what's after that? Generation AA?

"Homelanders" is a good one. Along that line could be Generation Orange (as in the pervasive Orange threat level after 9-11).