How many Millennials

Our topic today is the response to this tweet: 

Millennials! I have a question for you specifically!

How many of you have any sense or memory of the concept of a "rerun"? Do you have any meaningful recollection of an episode of TV you watched being such a thing?

— Daniel Summers, MD (@WFKARS) February 17, 2021

He clarified in the rest of his tweet thread what he meant by 'rerun' (tuning in to a weekly slot to find that the episode was one from a previous series), and that he was interested to know when exactly this ceased to be meaningful. He thought Gen Z probably don't really have much memory of this, but thought younger Millennials might, and so he asked 'how many of you [Millennials]'. 

The answer to a 'how many' question is a number or proportion (in this case, people reply 'me' or 'not me' and he gets a sense of the numbers), like '50%' or 'all of them'. There is definitely a presupposition that at least some Millennials will remember this concept. Exactly how many is mostly defined by pragmatics and shared context, I think. 

Compare asking a group of your friends the following: 

How many of you are coming to my comic book launch on Friday?

You would expect a fairly high number of them to come, because it's important and they're your friends. You could also ask your colleagues this question: 

How many of you are going to the meeting this afternoon?

That might be fairly neutral and you just want to know how many of them will be there, or not available at the alternative event at the same time, or whatever. You definitely imply that you think at least some of them will be going to the meeting. You could also ask a question like this:

How many of you learnt about grammar in English lessons at school?

Now, the answer is expected to be pretty low, and is a rhetorical device to lead into your lecture on the importance of grammar or the fact that they have tacit knowledge of grammar despite the lack of formal teaching, or whatever. If more than about one person answers 'me' now, it actually spoils your flow. 

So we can ask a 'how many' question with an expected answer of everyone, no one, or anything in between, or a neutral non-expectation. 

I now present you with a lesson in asking about Millennials on twitter: this tweet got 2,700 responses and a fair number of those were people who were pretty cross about this man supposedly thinking that Millennials are kids who don't remember this stuff when in fact they're in their 30s and maybe even 40 years old now, and of course they remember it. I've tried to think of any possible syntactic or semantic reason for the question being interpreted this way, and I can't. It's purely a result of the frequent co-occurrence of the term 'Millennial' with 'kids these days' messages and the resulting knee-jerk reaction to this that you get after the billionth time of seeing it. In this case, I think it was misplaced, but you can understand it.