Another bland generic apartment complex is being marketed as the hippest thing to hit Charlotte in years.
I can get past the requisite “creative class” mumbo jumbo (ground level retail space for art dealers? a climbing wall? yeah, right…) and the absurdity of the notion that one can actually build a “hip, urban village” from scratch. I can get past Doug Smith’s erroneous assumption that “shiny, brand new, and above all, dense” is synonymous with “urban”. I’m used to it. I’ve been reading his columns (not to mention sites like Urban Planet) for years.
What’s bugging me specifically about this article, though, is the fact that Doug is still using a stale, trite term like “thirtysomethings”. For god’s sake, can we please retire this hackneyed cliché and its younger sibling “twentysomethings”?
For those who don’t remember, a largely subpar TV series that went off the air about fifteen years ago is responsible for this annoying shorthand for the more digestible “people in their thirties”. You can’t find reruns of the show anymore (there’s at least some justice in the world) but the title will apparently haunt us forever.
Ten years ago when “thirtysomethings” was still being used regularly in the bar reviews of almost every magazine in the country, it was already stupid and annoying and not at all “fresh”. Today, it grates on the nerves in sort of the same way it used to horrify the Brady kids to say “groovy” in 1974, long after the rest of the world had moved on.
It must be stopped. Now.