‘Older’ crowd hard to describe with words
By NPR
About one-fifth of the U.S. population will be 65 or older by the year 2030. NPR’s Ina Jaffe covers this population — and says it’s often difficult to find the right words to describe it.
“I realized what a minefield this was after I’d been on the beat just a few months,” she says. “I did profile of this 71-year-old midwife. She’s still up all night delivering babies, and the headline on our website — and reporters … do not write the headlines … described her as ‘elderly.’
“Listeners were furious,” Jaffe continues. “Maybe once upon a time, ‘elderly’ referred to a particular stage in life, but now people think … it means you’re ailing and you’re frail.”
Jaffe sometimes uses “older adults” or “older Americans,” she says, if it’s relevant to the story. “Sometimes I use the term ‘senior’ — though I’ve met some older people who don’t like that, either. And ‘senior citizen’ really seems to annoy just about everyone now. … There really aren’t a lot of widely acceptable terms anymore.”
A traffic sign in the U.K. depicts “elderly people” as frail and hunched over. It was first created in the 80s, but many now consider it out of date.
So, there lies a paradox: Everyone wants to live a long time, but no one wants to actually be old.
Well the issue discussed above about aging shouldn’t be too surprising as the generation moving into their sixties now grew up saying “don’t trust anyone over 30”.
The use of that phrase certainly reveals a lot about what that generation thought of the world, their social relations, and their own future. Maybe hiding under a desk at school during air raid drills when even as a first grader you knew it wasn’t likely to protect you much from a nuclear bomb had more of an effect that we realized.
But one thing is really clear from the original article – we are an extremely age prejudiced culture – why do we need these words at all? – it’s like asking “black people” do you want to be called black, Negro, African American, etc (and then we have all the adjectives that are intentionally derogatory) – why isn’t it (if say we don’t know their name) we just call them “people” or “a person”, – why the use of the extra adjective? – we use those adjectives, elderly, black, Asian, white, whatever in so many unnecessary contexts to describe someone that is somehow different than us – and although we may think we are being more precise, we are in fact being hurtful and emphasizing our differences rather than what we have in common. So we all have an age that is a number – why don’t we just leave it at that!