(Image by Flicker user Payton Chung)
I’m calling it neolohunger: the yearning—to which Calvin Trillin recently confessed in The New York Times and from which I also suffer—to, in Trillin’s words, “slip a phrase into the language.”
The phrase he holds up for envy is Tom Brokaw’s “the greatest generation,” referring to those who fought World War II and went on to rebuild America and Europe. Indeed, the phrase is now instantly familiar, even to those who don’t consider that generation to be so very great. For me, the gold ring was nabbed by Stephen Colbert when he came up with truthiness, which went on to become the 2005 Word of the Year.
Note that we’re not talking here, strictly speaking, about coinage. Surely someone had called some group of people the greatest generation before Brokaw,…