Generation (from the Latin generāre, meaning "to beget"), also known as procreation in biological sciences, is the act of producing offspring.
In kinship terminology it is a structural term designating the parent-child relationship. The term is also often used synonymously with cohort in social science, even though some researchers believe that this usage is misleading; under this formulation the term means "people within a delineated population who experience the same significant event within a given period of time." Generation in this sense of birth cohort is widely used in popular culture, and has been the basis for much social analysis.
Read more about Generation: Familial Generation, Social Generation, Other Generations
Famous quotes containing the word generation:
“I think one of the nicest things that we created as a generation was just the fact that we could say, Hey, I don’t like white people.”
—Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943)
“In colonial America, the father was the primary parent. . . . Over the past two hundred years, each generation of fathers has had less authority than the last. . . . Masculinity ceased to be defined in terms of domestic involvement, skills at fathering and husbanding, but began to be defined in terms of making money. Men had to leave home to work. They stopped doing all the things they used to do.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards,—raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)