BOOMER NOUN (PEOPLE AND SOCIETY)

In US slang, short for baby boomer: a person born as a result of the baby boom, a sharp increase in the birth rate which occurred in the US at the end of the Second World War and lasted until the mid sixties. Etymology: Formed by dropping the word baby from baby boomer. Before this, boomer had meant 'a person who pushes or boosts an enterprise' in US English. History and Usage: The term baby boom has been in use in US English since the forties, but it was only when the children born as a result of the postwar boom reached maturity in the seventies and eighties that baby boomers started to be referred to frequently in the American press. This generation was by then so numerically significant in US society that advertisers, businesses, and politicians considered them an essential group to cater for. So frequent did the name baby boomer become that by the end of the eighties it could be abbreviated to boomer without fear of misunderstanding, and boomer itself became the basis for compounds such as boomer-age and post-boomer. The post-boomers have also had to deal with the more recent sellout of the baby boom generation. Globe & Mail (Toronto) 27 May 1989, section D, p. 5 The script is ambitiously constructed, tracing the relationships of several boomer-age parents with their kids, their siblings, and their own parents. New Yorker 18 Sept. 1989, p. 28 The boomer group is so huge that it tends to define every era it passes through, forcing society to accommodate its moods and dimensions. Time 16 July 1990, p. 57 See also buster