<P> One feature of the boomers was that they have tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before or that has come afterward . In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the changes they were bringing about . This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon . The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and as "the pig in the python ." </P> <P> The term "Generation Jones" is sometimes used to describe those born roughly between 1954 and 1964 . The term is typically used to refer to the later years of the Baby boomer cohort and the early years of Generation X . </P> <P> The phrase baby boom refers to a noticeable increase in the birth rate . The post-war population increase was described as a "boom" by various newspaper reporters, including Sylvia F. Porter in a column for the May 4, 1951, edition of the New York Post, based on the increase in the population of the U.S. of 2,357,000 in 1950 . According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of "baby boomer" is in 1970 in The Washington Post . Various authors have delimited the baby boom period differently . Landon Jones, in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (1980), defined the span of the baby - boom generation as extending from 1943 through 1960, when annual births increased over 4,000,000 . Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, well known for their generational theory, define the social generation of Boomers as that cohort born from 1943 to 1960, who were too young to have any personal memory of World War II, but old enough to remember the postwar American High . </P> <P> In the U.S., the generation can be segmented into two broadly defined cohorts: The Leading - Edge Baby Boomers are individuals born between 1946 and 1955, those who came of age during the Vietnam War era . This group represents slightly more than half of the generation, or roughly 38,002,000 people of all races . The other half of the generation was born between 1956 and 1964 . Called Late Boomers, or Trailing - Edge Boomers, this second cohort includes about 37,818,000 individuals, according to Live Births by Age and Mother and Race, 1933--98, published by the Center for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics . </P>

Where did the term baby boomer come from