youthquake

a significant political or social change caused by the actions of young people

Another year largely dominated by unsettling and polarised political views, 2017 also saw a trace of positivity whose lexical characterisation was deemed significant enough for Oxford University Press to select it as their word of the year. This was a period in which young adults had unexpectedly caused significant tremors to vibrate through the political landscape, their collective influence resulting in what has become dubbed a youthquake.

young adults had unexpectedly caused significant tremors to vibrate through the political landscape … resulting in what has become dubbed a youthquake.

The chief instigator of these 'seismic' rumblings turned out to be the UK's snap election called by prime minister Theresa May in a bid to secure a larger majority (purportedly to strengthen her position in relation to controversial Brexit negotiations). On Thursday 8th June 2017, young British voters confounded expectations by turning out in record numbers in support of the opposing Labour Party, increasing their share of the vote to 40% and throwing a spanner in the works for the governing Conservative Party who, far from gaining ground, unexpectedly found themselves a minority government forced into a coalition with Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party. It seemed that, for the first time ever, Britain's younger generation had flexed their political muscles to real effect, and youthquake, now abruptly splashed across global headlines, was the linguistic acknowledgement of young people's capacity to drive political change.

The 'aftershocks' of this youthquake subsequently rippled across political landscapes in Europe and the rest of the world, the possibility of comparable engagement by young people in Australia, New Zealand and the United States further cementing the word's potential to stick around. It will be interesting to see how it fares in years to come, but it's undoubtedly a refreshing antidote to the divisive overtones of newcomers such as fake news, post-truth, and snowflake (a dismissive reference to someone which suggests that if they challenge a prevailing opinion, they're being oversensitive).

Background – youthquake

The word youthquake is of course a blend of youth and earthquake. Although productive manipulation of earthquake is well-attested (e.g. moonquake and seaquake can be used to describe disturbances on the surface of the moon and sea bed respectively) it's an interesting example of a blend based on a metaphorical, rather than literal, sense of the word.

The youth component of the expression has been said to relate to the millennial generation, a broad term variously interpreted to refer to anyone born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s (also know more precisely as Generation Y or Generation Z, depending on where in the range the birth year falls).

Surprisingly enough, original use of the term youthquake predates the millennial generation quite considerably. Though pretty obscure until it popped out of the woodwork in 2017, the word in fact dates back to 1965, when it was used to describe a burgeoning youth culture reflected in music and fashion which rejected the traditional values of the previous generation.