For your edification.  Excerpts from the novel Generation X  by Douglas Coupland.  Compiled by Luanne Kwon 1995.

McJob
A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

Poverty Jet Set
A group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense oflong-term jobs stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone-call relationships withpeople named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programs at parties.

Historical Underdosing
To live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

Historical Overdosing
To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

Historical Slumming
The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestacks industrial sites, rural villages-locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back-so as to experience relief when one returns back to "the present".

Brazilification
The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

Vaccinated Time Travel
To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.

Decade Blending
In clothing: the indiscriminate combination of two or more items from various decades to create a personal mood: Sheila = Mary Quaint earrings (1960s) + cork wedgie platform shoes (1970s) + black leather jacket (1950s and 1980s).

Veal-Fattening Pen
Small, cramped workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small pre-slaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.

Emotional Ketchup Burst
The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside oneself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends-most of whom thought things were fine.

Bleeding Ponytail
An elderly sold-out baby boomer who pines for hippie or pre-sellout days

Boomer Envy
Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births.

Clique Maintenance
The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego.

Consensus Terrorism
The process that decides in-office attitudes and behaviour.

Sick Building Migration
The tendency of younger workers to leave or avoid jobs in unhealthy office environments or workplaces affected by the Sick Building Syndrome.

Recurving
Leaving one job to take another that pays less but places one back on the learning curve.

Ozmosis
The inability of one's job to live up to one's self-image

Power Mist
The tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation.

Overboarding
Overcompensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrelated to one's previous life interests.

Earth Tones
A youthful subgroup interested in vegetarianism, tie-dye outfits, mild recreational drugs, and good stereo equipment. Earnest, frequently lacking in humor.

Ethnomagnetism
The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods.

Mid-Twenties Breakdown
A period of mental collapse occuring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structural environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks industion into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

Successophobia
The fear that if one's life is successful, then one's personal needs will be forgotten and one will no longer have one's childish needs catered to.

Safety Net-ism
The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.

Divorce Assumption
A form of Safety Net-ism, the belief that if a marriage doesn't work out, then there is no problem because partners can simply seek a divorce.

Anti-Sabbatical
A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often a year). The intention is usually related to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions.

Legislated Nostalgia
To force a body of people to have memories they may not actually possess: "How can I be part of the 1960s generation when I don't even remember any of it?"

Now Denial
To tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the only time that may ever be interesting is the future.

Bambification
The mental conversion of flesh and blood living creatures into cartoon characters possessing bourgeois Judeo-Christian attitudes and morals.

Diseases for Kisses (Hyperkarma)
A deeply rooted belief that punishment will somehow always be far greater than the crime: ozone holes for littering.

Spectacularism
A fascination with extreme situations.

Lessness
A philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth: "I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a big shot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho."

Status Substitution
Using an object with intellectual or fashionable cachet to substitute for an object that is merely pricey: "Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother's BMW."

Survivulousness
The tendency to visualize oneself enjoying being the last remaining person on Earth.

Platonic Shadow
A nonsexual friendship with a member of the opposite sex.

Mental Ground Zero
The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently a shopping mall.

Cult of Aloneness
The need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships. Often brought about by overly high expectations of others.

Celebrity Schadenfreude
Lurid thrills derived from talking about celebrity deaths.

The Emperor's New Mall
The popular notion that shopping malls exist on the insides only and have no exterior. The suspension of visual belief engendered by this notion allows shoppers to pretend that the large, cement blocks thrust into their environment do not, in fact, exist.

Poorochondria
Hypochondria derived from not having medical insurance.

Personal Tabu
A small rule for living, bordering on a superstition, that allows one to cope with everyday life in the absence of cultural or religious dictums.

Architectural Indigestion
The almost obsessive need to live in a 'cool' architectural environment. Frequently related objects of fetish include framed black-and-white art photography (Diane Arbus a favorite);simplistic pine furniture; matte black high-tech items such as TVs, stereos, and telephones; low-wattage ambient lighting; a lamp chair, or table that eludes to the 1950s; cut flowers with complex names.

Japanese Minimalism
The most frequently offered interior design aesthetic used by rootless career-hopping young people.

Bread and Circuits
The electronic era tendency to view party politics as corny-no longer relevant or meaningful or useful to modern societal issues,and in many cases dangerous.

Voter's Block
The attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting.

Armanism
After Georgio Armani: an obsession with mimicking the seamless and (more importantly) controlled ethos of Italian couture. Like Japanese Minimalism, Armanism reflects a profound inner need for control.

Poor Buoyancy
The realization that one was a better person when one had less money.

Musical Hairsplitting
The act of classifying music and musicians into pathologically picayune categories: "The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska."

101-ism
the tendency to pick apart, often in minute detail, all aspects of life using half-understood prop psychology as a tool.

Yuppie Wannabe's
An X generation subgroup that believes the myth of a yuppie life-style being both satisfying and viable. Tend to be highly in debt,involved in some form of substance abuse, and show a willingness to talk about Armageddon after three drinks.

Ultra Short Term Nostalgia
Homesickness for the extremely recent past.

Rebellion Postponement
The tendency in one's youth to avoid traditionally youthful activities and artistic experiences in order to obtain serious career experience. Sometimes results in the mourning for lost youth at about age thirty, followed by silly haircuts and expensive joke-inducing wardrobes.

Conspicuous Minimalism
A life-style tactic similar to Status Substitution. The nonownership of material goods flaunted as a token of moral and intellectual superiority.

Cafe Minimalism
To espouse a philosophy of minimalism without actually putting into practice any of its tenets.

O'Propriation
The inclusion of advertising, packaging, and entertainment jargon from earlier eras in everyday speech for ironic and /or comic effect.

Air Family
Describes the false sense of community experienced among co-workers in an office environment.

Squirming
Discomfort inflicted on young people by old people who see no irony in their gestures.

Recreational Slumming
The practice of participating in recreational activities of a class one perceives as lower than one's own.

Conversational Slumming
The self-conscious enjoyment of a given conversation precisely for its lack of intellectual rigor. A major spin-off activity of Recreational Slumming.

Occupational Slumming
Taking a job well beneath one's skill or education level as a means of retreat from adult responsibilities and/or avoiding possible failures in one's true occupation.

Anti-Victim Device
A small fashion accessory worn on an otherwise conservative outfit which announces to the world that one still has a spark of individuality burning inside.

Nutritional Slumming
Food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from a complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals, and packaging semiotics.

Tele-Parabalizing
Morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots.

QFD
Quelle f***ing drag

QFM
Quelle fashion mistake.

Me-ism
A search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself/herself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attributes.

Paper Rabies
Hypersensitivity to littering.

Bradyism
A multi-sibling sensibility derived from having grown up in large families. A rarity in those born after approximately 1965,symptoms include a facility for mind games, emotional withdrawal in situations of overcrowding, and a deeply felt need for a well-defined personal space.


Black Holes
An X generation subgroup best known for their possesion of almost entirely black wardrobes.

Black Dens
Where Black Holes live; often unheated warehouses with Day-Glo spray painting, mutilated mannequins, Elvis references, dozens of overflowing ashtrays, broken mirror sculptures, and Velvet Underground music playing in background.

Strangelove Reproduction
Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.

Squires
The most common X generation subgroup and the only subgroup given to breeding. Squires exist almost exclusively in couples and are recognizable by their frantic attempts to recreate a semblance of Eisenhower-era plentitude in their daily lives in the face of exorbitant housing prices and two-job life-styles. Squires tend to be continually exhausted from their voraciously acquisitive pursuit of furniture and knickknacks.

Poverty Lurks
Financial paranoia instilled in offspring by depression-era parents.

Pull-The-Plug, Slice the Pie
A fantasy in which an offspring mentally tallies up the net worth of his/her parents.

Underdogging
The tendency to almost invariably side with the underdog in a given situation. The consumer expression of this trait is the purchasing of less succesfull, 'sad', or failing products: "I know these Vienna franks are heart failure on a stick, but they were so sad looking up against all the other yuppie food items that I just had to buy them."

2 + 2 = 5-ism
Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after holding out for a long period of time.

Option Paralysis
The tendency, when given unlimited choices to make none.

Personality Tithe
A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring.

Jack-and-Jill Party
A Squire tradition; baby showers to which both men and women friends are invited as opposed to only women. Doubled purchasing power of bisexual attendance brings gift values up to Eisenhower-era standards.

Down-Nesting
The tendency of parents to move to smaller, guest-room-freehouses after the children have moved away so as to avoid children aged 20 to 30 who have boomeranged home.

Homeowner Envy
Feelings of jealousy generated in the young and the disenfranchised when facing gruesome housing statistics.

Green Division
To know the difference between envy and jealousy.

Knee-Jerk Irony
The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.

Derision Preemption
A life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers. Derision Preemption is the main goal of Knee-Jerk Irony.

Fame-Induced Apathy
The attitude that no activity is worth pursuing unless one can become very famous pursuing it. Fame-induced Apathy mimics laziness, but its roots are much deeper.

Dumpster Clocking
The tendency when looking at objects to guesstimate the amount of time they will take to eventually decompose.

The Tens
The first decade of a new century.

Metaphasia
An inability to perceive metaphors.

Dorian Graying
The unwillingness to gracefully allow one's body to show signs of aging.

Obscurism
The practice of peppering daily life with obscure film references(forgotten films, dead TV stars, unpopular books, defunct countries, etc.) as subliminal means of showcasing both one's education and one's wish to disassociate from the world of mass culture.

Terminal Wanderlust
A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location.

Cryptotechno-phobia
The secret belief that technology is more of a menace than a boon.

Virgin Runway
A travel destination chosen in the hopes that no one else has chosen it.

Native Aping
Pretending to be a native when visiting foreign countries.

Expatriate Solipsism
When arriving in a foreign travel destination one had hoped was undiscovered, only to find many people just like oneself; the peeved refusal to talk to said people because they have ruined one's elitist travel fantasy.

Emallgration
Migration toward lower-tech, lower-information environments containing a lessened emphasis on consumerism.