{
  "id": "greatest-generation.past-cohort",
  "term": "greatest generation",
  "sense": "past-cohort",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "published",
  "level": 19,
  "domain": "agency",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "Past members a collective self reads as its highest standard, so current members are read by how near they come to it.",
  "folk_gloss": "the generation that lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, praised as a model",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "past.temporal",
      "member.social",
      "collective-self.shared",
      "read.information",
      "high.spatial",
      "standard.norm",
      "current.present",
      "near.spatial",
      "come.arrive",
      "narrative.self-story"
    ],
    "interaction": "The narrative takes the members of one past period as the measure of members; later members inherit the standard without the walls that produced it, and are read by the distance.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "members measured against members",
      "a standard set by the dead",
      "a debt the living read themselves as owing"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "Tom Brokaw's 1998 book The Greatest Generation named Americans who grew up in the Great Depression and fought in or supported the Second World War.",
      "domain": "history"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "golden-age.past-peak",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "a golden age is a past window; this is a past set of members"
    },
    {
      "id": "founding-fathers.origin",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "founders set the first walls; this cohort is a standard of conduct, not a source of rules"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "greatest generation",
    "the greatest generation"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated",
    "date": "2026-09-29",
    "confidence": 0.85,
    "sources": [
      "schema/power-agency-phase.md"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-greatest-generation.past-cohort"
}