Thursday, 23 August 2018

What's in a name?

"Inc." (that's A Thing – sort of news/media/comment/coaching Thing) just published

A Study of 600,000 People Shows the Secret to Managing Millennials Is to Quit Thinking of Them as Millennials

Source

Hmm –  Well, yes, in a trivial sense.
<autobiographical_aside>
I dislike being called a Baby Boomer – as if I had been conceived in a frenzy of post-war optimism more than 5 years after VJ Day  Of course the term has a certain statistical value, but calling me a Baby Boomer says no more about me than – say – that my father was a Daily Mail reader: true, but lazy and misleading. (Besides, the context is very different – the Mail, last time he read it [1961] was... not the same [not to put too fine a point on it].)
</autobiographical_aside>

But that Inc. piece starts 
I just did a Google search for "manage Millennials." I got 28 million results. That's total overkill...
<autobiographical_note>
I struggled to avoid an automatic lip-curl reflex (LCR)  at the abuse of the word overkill (which has a particular political/military/economic sense –  a world away from the almost meaningless Jolly Big sense evoked by the author, 'Contributing Editor' Jeff Haden), but  life's too short to get upset about  this sort of illiteracy...
</autobiographical_note>
... especially since a recent study published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology shows there are much greater attitude and behavior differences within generations than between generations.

I tried out the first of Mr Haden's links, hoping to see further evidence of that Google-based finding. But no ... it's a link to another Inc. article.
<fact_check>
For the record, when I search for manage Millennials (two separate  words, no quotes) I get just over 23 million hits, and when I search for "manage Millennials"  I get fewer than 17,000.  I suppose Mr Haden's overkill figure is based on the first of these (with the extra 5 million being attributable to poetic (that is, lazy/Internet) licence.
</fact_check>
In other words the link does not lead to relevant information. Vannevar Bush (inspiration for Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext [that's what the H and the T stand for in  HTML]) would turn in his grave; what it does is irrelevantly drive traffic to another Inc. page.
<irony_alert>
Which I've just done. Oh well...
</irony_alert>

But the grass has started growing again. Nunc est MOW-endum, as Horace might have written (if only Latin had a W).

b
PS: A couple of clues –
  • Plunge into millpond, say, making for fortunate coincidence (11)
  • Christian? About time for a trouble-maker. (4-6)
Update: 2019.02.05.13:00 – Nested paren. fixes (natch) and added PS

PS
Crossword answers: SERENDIPITY, ANTI-CHRIST

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