"Trends" and "millennials" are scary enough separately -- whose brilliant idea was it to put them together?

This helpful guide is provided by Alexandra Petri with her washingtonpost.com post today, "Trend piece about Millennials finds new trend: that trend pieces are being written."

by Ken

As noted above, Washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri has worked up this helpful flow chart to assist would-be writers of such pieces to stifle the impulse to write yet another piece about the trend of writing pieces about millennials. This department is pleased to get behind an idea so excellent that one hopes it becomes a trend. Except that should it in fact become a trend, this department will probably be forced to weigh in against it.

I suppose there are such things as "good trends," and if you give me some time, I'm sure I'll be able to come up with a for-instance. Given the likelihood that any newly spotted trend is likely to depress this department, it frequently finds itself in the position of denouncing whatever trend happens to be intruding on its peace.

Pretty much the same is true of most anything having to do with millennials. Speaking hypothetically, I suppose if all the millennials were to get together and come up with a cure for cancer, we would have to listen to a certain amount of yammering about the millennials in order to glean the odd word or two allowed to creep through concerning you know, the cure for cancer.

Since I pay so little attention to the subject of millennials -- as soon as I see the word "millennial," I take that as my cue to proceed to the next subject -- I hadn't realized the threatening level that has been reached by this trend toward thumb-sucking about the trend of thumb-sucking about millennials. To illustrate the point, Alexandra quotes a chunk of a New York Times piece by one of the institution's dimmer lights, Sam Tanenhaus -- a chunk that begins, "Suddenly, as you may have noticed, millennials are everywhere," a rises to a distinctly nauseating rhetorical pitch for the revelation, "This newspaper is no exception." I'm not going to give you either the full chunk Alexandra quotes or the link to the piece, both of which you can find on her site. I feel it would be irresponsible of me to contribute to spreading this bilge.

Alesandra's summation, however, I pass on cheerfully:

This is literally a meta-trend piece about how many trend pieces are written about Millennials. Then it goes on to be just a regular trend piece about how Millennials Possess (Along With The Attributes Generally Ascribed To Them) An Attribute You Wouldn’t Expect!

And Alexandra herself is feeling . . . well, her own pain.

Again I say, as we have said so often before:

PLEASE NO

PLEASE MAKE IT STOP

HAVE WE NOT SUFFERED ENOUGH
CAN WE NOT APPEASE YOU

She insists that she means "no ill will to any individual writer." (Not even Sam Tanenhaus? Pity. There's a lost opportunity.) "I understand," she says, "that we all must eat, even those of us who earn our bread by cranking out yet another story about how many stories there are about Millennials." And by way of showing her fellow feeling toward her fellow trend-charters, she offers the "guide" I've plunked atop this post, whose logic seems to me irrefutable.

Alternatively, she proposes a compromise: "just to print the headline and let us infer the contents."

It’s a familiar tune, and if you give me a couple of bars, I can absolutely play the whole thing through, with flourishes.

“Millennials: The Most [Adjective] Generation Yet.” You wouldn’t even have to include any text. Just “blah blah helicopter blah blah basement blah blah self-absorbed.” We could take it from there.

I think many of us have already adopted this system as readers. Let's say I somehow found myself confronted with a head like, say, "Generation Nice," with the blurb "The Millennials Are Generation Nice." This happens to be the online head for the Sam Tanenhaus piece Alexandra is quoting from. (Yes, I clicked through, but bear in mind that under the Times system, a click on a third-party link is a free click.)

The fact is that I work pretty hard to keep myself out of contact with such heads, for reasons I hope I don't have to explain. (My stomach is strong, but not that strong.) I think by the word "Generation," I would be fleeing like the wind, but if on a slow day I somehow made it as far as "The Millennials," I would for sure be out the door and in the next county. If I nevertheless persevered to the "By Sam Tanenhaus," well, I would probably be gasping for air. I can't imagine the idea of reading such a piece ever occurring to me.

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