Abstract: The article examines the use of the term lost generation in modern journalistic discourse, which originally referred to writers of the first half of the twentieth century who passed the First World War and expressed in their work its tragic experience, their inner emptiness and alienation from society. The presence of an attribute with a characterizing meaning in this idiomatic term allows it to be determinologized and used in modern Russian speech as a free phrase: in relation to different generations of people, primarily to modern Russian youth. The purpose of the article is to describe the main types of usage of the syntagma lost generation in modern Russian speech and to identify their connection with the original meaning of the term. The research material is contexts extracted from the National Corpus of the Russian language, as well as the results of the linguistic experiment conducted by the authors. The authors uses quantitative, functional-semantic, descriptive methods, uses the method of component analysis, highlights the main meanings and areas of use of syntagma as a steadily reproducible precedent nomination. Comparison of the experimental results and analysis of the contexts of the National Corpus of the Russian language shows significant consistency. Both in the survey and in the corpus, the terminological use is quite frequent (the second most frequent among all the selected types), however, it is significantly inferior to the totality of non-terminological uses, among which both close to the original and rather distant ones stand out (‘youth’, ‘people who did not justify the hopes placed on them in the professional sphere’, ‘socially unprotected groups' and others).