At Least I Can Copy Edit

Neil Howe made an interesting point in the Washington Post, about what it's like to be the pig's tail in the python.

Lately demographers have been calling me the tail end of the baby boom, but I proudly insist that I am Gen X. Howe makes some interesting points about us

• "relatively large share of higher-order siblings"
• "By the time they entered middle and high school, classrooms were opened, standards were lowered and supervision had disappeared."
• "they arrived too late to enter the most lucrative professions and the cushiest corporations, by now glutted with Boomer yuppies."

Howe calls Sarah Palin typical of my cohort, alas. In general, he calls us "practical and resilient, they handle risk well and they know how to improvise even when the experts don't know the answer."

The article itself is thought-provoking for Americans in their early 40s and people who care about them.

I do hope that whoever wrote the headline was not one of us. "Early Xers..." Howe writes "are impatient with syntax and punctuation and citations--and all the other brainy stuff they were never taught." In fact, I was very fortunate to attend private high school on scholarship, where I learned a lot, and I've gone on to learn a lot more.

The headline "The Kids Are Alright. But Their Parents ... " may pass the Word "spelling and grammar" check, but even this Gen X-er would not let "alright" past her copy desk.