I have asked this question before are you old, a senior, a Zoomer or a Boomer. I was struck by how we use the word old or elder when we were examining some of our workshop material. The word old, with its connotations of deterioration and obsolescence, doesn’t capture the many different arcs a human life can trace after middle age.
There are other Euphemisms, too: References to one’s
“golden years” and to old people as “sages” or “super adults” strain to gloss
over the realities of old age. “Phrases such as ‘70 is the new 50’ reflect a
‘positive ageing’ discourse, which suggests that the preferred way of being old
is to not be old at all, but rather to maintain some image of middle-age
functionality and appearance
A term that is gaining popularity according to Kory Stamper, a lexicographer and an author is an older person. That’s according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, a database of more than 600 million words collected from newspapers, novels, speeches, and other sources. The database also indicates that elderly, mature, and ageing have been falling in popularity over the past 30 years.
Replacements for all these existing terms—older as
well as the words it’s gradually displacing—have been proposed over the years.
For at least a couple of decades, gerontological researchers have been making a
distinction between the young-old (typically those in their 60s and 70s) and
the old old (definitions vary, but 85 and up is common). Another academic term
is third age, which refers to the period after retirement but before the fourth
age of infirmity and decline (which some would argue unjustly legitimizes
distinctions based on physical abilities). But none of these has caught on outside
the realms of academic research and op-eds.
Ideally, a definition of old age would capture a sense
of things ending, or at least getting closer to ending. All those people who
call 65 “middle-aged” isn’t delusional—they probably just don’t want to be
denied their right to have ambitions and plans for the stretch of their life
that’s still ahead of them, even if that stretch is a lot shorter than the one
behind them.
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