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Comment by 4star3star | Hacker News Reader

The elderly? I'm drawing a blank.

Likewise. Boomers aren't typically elderly, yet.

Even when Alan Pardew (and I take great pleasure in being the first to mention his name in this forum) called opposing soccer manager Manuel Pellegrini "a fucking old cunt" it wasn't perceived as a slur on his elderlyness. It was the cunt bit that got him in trouble - and, even then, not that much.

Boomers are 60-80 years old. That’s elderly.

Tbf, streamers, kids etc constantly call people in their thirties boomer.

I feel like it's becoming a word describing people that have passed their prime (~35+ yo).

Yes, I'm fully aware that the word initially described people that were born during the baby boomer years (~1950) and that the people that are currently 35yo are millennials.

I am 35 and I was called a boomer by some youngling colleagues. I laughed like a true boomer full of sneer that those younglings are all a bunch of lazy losers that will not amount to anything as great as me all their life. I am pretty sure the generation before me thought the same and so on. It is great!

> typically

80 years ago was 1944 - not exactly a boom year. Most are 60-65-70 and would not consider themselves elderly. It's a very loaded word.

50s are "late middle age", and 60-65 is the crossover point to "elderly" in my book. You're likely in the last couple of decades of your life by then.

In most western countries your 60s is when you start drawing an old age pension. The post ww2 boom started when people got home so births from about 1946. Those people have been drawing US social security for over a decade.

I guess you are in your twenties?

There's plenty of sources out there for definitions. Most of them say 65 and almost all of the rest say 60.

You go directly from middle aged to elderly, there isn't a step in between. Being elderly can cover a very wide range of years.

65 is well into 'AARP territory', as my elderly father would call it.

That said, I've had friends that were elderly in their mid thirties.. State of mind and all that.

Middle age is 45 to 65, and Old age can perhaps be thought of as the following three ten year periods: Go, Go-slow, No-go - that would make elderly as 75+

(Rationale being retirement planning advisors encourage people to make the most of those first ten years (65 to 75) to do bucket-list things while (usually) they still can)

I'm slap bang in the middle of that range at 68. I do not consider myself elderly.

I'm guessing that one is "Boomer", but I don't think it is so taboo that it cannot be uttered yet.

Depends on the context and social circle, like lots of post-slang terms for a class. It can be endearing (or endearing and patronizing), a general insult, a common adjective…

There's obscenity and there's violence.

Some words imply the person you're insulting is unsavory. Some words imply "I have power over you such that I can do anything I want and you can't stop me."

The degree to which this violence is allowed in a culture also conveys the power of the word in play.

I just saw your response to this - that's an excellent and concise way to explain this. Thank you.

There're many categories of violence, and semantic violence can evoke any and all of those.

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