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There was no Ford Model S
Actually, there very much was a Ford Model S.
I started laughing when you said "there was no covid 18"
This should be the top-ranked explanation.
no xbox 359
Because they were named before we started using letters of the alphabet to name generations. Why would such a thing be retroactive?
Because "X" wasn't a term that originated from the ordinality of the alphabet, but rather the idea of an "eXperimental" generation living in a new kind of society.
There's also no "Y" generation and "Z" are usually so called out of fatalistic dramaticism.
This is one if those cultural things that has so much nuance and potential depth to it that people write whole books about it, so don't expect to be satisfied with a simple answer.
Millennials were called Gen Y by some, for a little while.
Yeah, we were called "Generation Y" until about 2008.
Apologies in advance for the long reply. I have written extensively about this subject on various forums over the past decade.
The X in Generation X originated as a generic placeholder. There was a proposal back in the late '80s to refer to the generation that came after the Baby Boom cohort as The Blank Generation. Prior to Strauss and Howe, there was no practice of giving each social generation a unique or special name. Prior to the emergence of the social generation concept, there was the concept of historical generations. Very few generational cohorts were ever known by any nickname at all. When such names did arise, they were applied to a subset of people who were connected to some major event, and the membership of those groups was not based on age or birth year.
The Baby Boom generation was the first one with a name that was applied to every person born within a set of bracket years. This was because that generation's members were all part of a unique and well-recognized demographic phenomenon (a sharp and sustained increase in the birth rate during the two decades that followed the end of the Second World War). That phenomenon was regarded as a historical event, and not simply seen as the normal emergence of a new generation.
When members of the Baby Boom generation started reaching adulthood and began having children of their own, there was idle, non-serious speculation in broadcast and print media about what those children would be called. Since the emergence of that follow-up cohort was not associated with some significant historical event, some writers sarcastically referred to them as the No Name Generation or Blank Generation. (Remember, most generations never had any nickname, because that practice had never previously been a thing that people did.)
Subsequently, "Blank Generation" was replaced with "X Generation." "X" was used because it was the symbol for the unknown value in algebraic equations.
In the 1990s, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe invented the term "Millennial generation" for the next cohort, whose members would be coming of age in the first decade of the Third Millennium (and another very significant event in history).
The collective hive mind that constitutes the social networking universe came up with the names of the subsequent cohorts (Gen Z and Alpha).
The name came from "baby boomers" - when WWII soldiers came back, they had a lot of babies around the same time. 3+ million babies were born in 1946.
We see the same numbers now and our population is more than double what it was in the 1940s. In 1945 the pop was 139.9 million. It's 334.2 now.
Births was around 2.5-2.6 million per year before.
Other countries exist.
I'm a second generation Nicaraguan-American born in Puerto Rico, raised in Miami, having gotten my MSc in the UK, currently living in China.
Shut the fuck up.
There was no systematic naming system for social generations back then. In fact, most previous generations weren't known by any name. Generation X only acquired its nickname after its members were already adults. Only the most recent social generations have population-wide nicknames. That trend was started by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in their first book, published in the early 1990s. That book outlined their highly speculative and controversial theory of a four-stage cycle of generational archetypes. Strauss and Howe invented the term "Millennial Generation."
The alphabetic sequencing of generational nicknames was something that emerged on social networking sites. It is entirely ad hoc, having been metaphorically pulled out of the derriers and soiled underwear of dozens of anonymous keyboard jockeys, and is not based on any known theory of society or social generations.
The cultural term "Generation X" came directly from a hugely popular novel among that generation when they first aged into their twenties, named Generation X by Douglas Coupland and published in 1991. An indie book that wasn't expected to sell well (its first printing was only 5,000 copies), Coupland's discussion of he and his friends' ennui about life and hatred of Baby Boomers struck a massive chord among people his age, and unexpectedly ended up selling millions of copies. Eventually the subjects he discusses in that book became so well-known among people of that age, the term started getting used as a phrase to describe everyone in their twenties in those years. (I'm 55, and was in college when the book came out, so I personally lived through all these events, and I was one of the millions of young people back then who responded passionately to the book.)
For what it's worth, Coupland himself stole the term from the 1980s punk band Generation X, most famously known now for starting the career of Billy Idol.
The thing you need to understand about the generational naming is it's not part of some system which has been used for centuries to recognise and study generations. It's part of a system from a book written in 1991 designed to divide the population neatly into groups which would fit the two authors' theory (the "Strauss-Howe generational theory").
For the record, if you're interested, that theory basically says that all of humanity can be divided up into four revolving generations - one which experiences an economic and creative flourishing as a result of a post-crisis optimism, the next which becomes decadent and individualistic as a result of that flourishing, the next which comes to mistrust government because of individualism and where society basically turns on itself, and finally a generation which is so aggressive and has so little societal cohesion and belief in institutions that it causes the next crisis (usually a war) in its efforts to create change.
For the record, there's a lot going for the theory (and yes, obviously the theory says we are heading into the next crisis, which seems somewhat accurate right now) but there's also lots of holes in the theory - not least that pre-WW2 it only really works for the USA, even though it claims to define humans as a whole throughout history. But I'm getting sidetracked.
Anyway, when Strauss and Howe wrote their book they talked about the various previous generations in order to explain and justify their theory. But at the time, Gen Xers were only between 10 and 26 years old and hadn't had enough time to define themselves in their impact on society. So Strauss and Howe just turned to mathematical naming convention, where X, Y and Z are used to name typical unknowns, and so named them Gen X.
As for why we never gave Gen X a proper name...basically because it took a while for the book's ideas to spread enough for people to take notice. By the time it had, Gen Y was the generation everyone was talking about so that was the generation everyone wanted to name.
Because “Baby Boomers” was the first term that was coined