IT’S AN AUTUMNAL-EQUINOX MISCmedia, the online column that thinks warning labels may have gone a little too far when Frito-Lay feels obligated to print “NOT A SODIUM-FREE FOOD” in big fat letters on the bag of its bags for Salt and Vinegar flavored potato chips.

WHEN I WAS FREELANCING in early ’93 for the Seattle Times’ high-school tabloid Mirror, I was asked to write a preview blurb for the Coneheads movie.

I began, “Around the time some of you were born, Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin began this occasional TV skit….”

The yuppie ladies who ran Mirror wouldn’t believe it, until I showed them the math and convinced them that, indeed, 1977 was 16 years prior to 1993.

This generation-gapping has since become officially recognized by Beloit College in Wisconsin. For at least the second year, Beloit has released a list of cultural reference points that differentiate students born in the early ’80s from their presumably-older instructors.

Beloit’s 1998 list states that then-first-year students born in 1980 “have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era.” (Of course, these days neither does Reagan.) These now-19-year-olds “are too young to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up;” “have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels;” and have always known the AIDS crisis. To them, “The Tonight Show has always been with Jay Leno” and “there has always been MTV, and it has always included non-musical shows.”

Its 1999 list states that for “the first generation to be born into Luvs, Huggies, and Pampers,” “John Lennon and John Belushi have always been dead.” These new adults “felt pretty special when their elementary school had top-of-the-line Commodore 64s,” and “have always been able to get their news from USA Today and CNN.”

Also for this year, the college included a second list compiled by students of things they get that their teachers don’t: “They know who Tina Yothers is;” “They know what a ‘Whammy’ is;” “Partying ‘like it’s 1999’ seemed SOOO far away.”

Besides giving the teachers a quick and needed jolt-O-reality (yes, you are getting old, no matter how much skin creme you use or how many miles you jog), such lists teach a valuable lesson: Even within the realm of North American “mainstream” culture, even within the small slice of that culture that’s likely to end up at a whitebread private college in the Midwest, different folks have different backgrounds and different worldviews. Diversity already exists, darn near everywhere.

If we’re really lucky, such lists might also dispel certain boomer-centric myths. As I’ve ranted before, kids today don’t know the Beatles as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” They’ve had Beatles nostalgia shoved at them all their lives, but have never heard of Wings.

Indeed, we must remember that the popcult past gets recycled so much more thoroughly these days, that college freshmen probably know a lot more about their teachers’ coming-O-age cliches than vice versa. Oldies radio and Nick At Nite keep instructing new generations in the lyrics to “Takin’ Care of Business” and the phrase “Kid Dy-No-Mite.”

But will the profs bother to learn about Beck or Clueless?

As IF!

MONDAY: Some more of this, including some of your suggestions about what youngster things oldsters don’t get and vice versa.

ELSEWHERE:

• PBS mistakenly thinks the way to get younger folks into politics is to treat those younger folks as idiots….
• Will this stop the insuffrable Frisco-elitists from forever whining to me about how everything in their town’s so goddamn superior to everything everyplace else? Probably not, alas….
• James Fallows’s long, thorough Y2K-mania examination….
• More proof that noisy motorcycle jocks are no longer “rebels”….