Every so often, some beloved author or noted performer – often someone who earned a reputation decades ago for being progressive – speaks up and declares that today’s younger generations have taken things too far: they want special treatment and they complain all the time and they ought to be grateful for the work that was done by their elders and there are some things that just aren’t right…
Reactions are rapid and contrary. Relatives of a certain age post pictures of the rant with enthusiastic endorsement on Facebook. Young social activists and erstwhile fans express disappointment on Twitter. Overpaid jeremiadists weigh in with sesquipedalian asperity in legacy media. Some other equally famous person of similar age posts a cogent and trenchant takedown. The discourse moves on after a few days, but the air of cantankery follows the person’s name like a fart.
And the mental borborygmus that started it all? The articulated indignation of a senior forward-thinker? On close examination, it’s exgramination: sheer get-off-my-lawnery.
You’re familiar with “Get off my lawn,” I trust: the stereotypical cry of the peeved senior faced with youths besporting themselves on his or her personal patch of grass. How dare they come onto this turf with no respect? If German had a word for this, it might be Rasenwut – from Rasen ‘lawn’ and Wut ‘rage’. But our word today, exgramination, is from Latin ex- meaning ‘off’ or ‘from’ and gramina meaning ‘turf’ (nominative singular gramen). If it sounds a bit like a grumpy grandpa’s fulmination of consternation, that’s just an apposite coincidence.
Sure, the exgraminator worked hard to earn that turf. In their youth, they fought against the thick-headed inertia of their forebears. They wanted freedom! And, to some extent, they got it. And they got their comfortable space as a recognized hero of freedom. But the times move on, and things that were at the leading edge at one time are overgrown and bygone at another.
Some people are happy to see progress being made by younger generations, and endorse and encourage it. Others, however, feel that they have earned respect, they are the true forward-thinkers, and anything that is not consistent with their own established positions is simply wrong. Not progressive; freakish. Certainly disrespectful. Get off that lawn! How dare you!
Now, it is known that people who have been rich and famous for some time often lose perspective and empathy, sometimes strikingly, but that’s not universal. And, naturally, people who have always been known to be conservative are also typically grumpy at the changes wrought (or at least embraced) by later generations – and, frankly, by their own generation, too, but no one is surprised at that. (And who would come to play on their lawn anyway? It’s fenced off and has a guard dog on it.) It’s just those who endorsed change who have the inviting grass… though somehow someone else’s is always just a bit greener. And if their endorsement of change was based less on principle and more on self-interest, you can expect an exgramination that will draw some attention too.
I hope, of course, that I shall never be an exgraminator. Among other things, I do my bit by persisting in innovation – for instance, by confecting words that should have existed already. Such as exgramination. It’s a new old word. But who among you would object to it?
Sesquiotica 