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The authors focus on a corpus of words referring to and characterizing “youngsters,” key actors of two recent events (Fall 2005 suburban crisis and Winter 2006 university crisis), to show how naming participates in the representation of events. We first list the various “ways of naming” “youngsters” in two face-to-face pages of national dailies. We then extract various designation paradigms from the collected corpus which function as characterizations of the young actors involved in these two events. The processing of a third event, just to check, leads one to question the discursive representations conveyed by names and the role of memory (inter-discursive or collective memory) in the representation of events and their young actors.