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Welcome to the new “Elders†section of the BlogHer community, a blog about aging for people of all ages.
In the few places where getting old is discussed in terms other than masking it, old people are most frequently referred to as seniors and senior citizens. I ditched those words from day one on my blog, because through overuse they have become as pejorative as biddy, fogey, coot, geezer, fossil and other terms of un-endearment perpetrated by our culture’s youth and beauty police.
The cutesy labels - golden-ager, third-ager, oldster - and mature too - are worse because, like all euphemisms, they shroud and distort meaning. It is a form of thought control as all governments know: “Collateral damage†doesn’t conjure mental pictures of bloody, mangled bodies the way “dead civilians†does. Similarly, those who hide behind golden-ager and other tortured circumlocutions hope others who read or hear their words will not think sags, bags and wrinkles that are the normal outcome of a long life.
So instead, I used such phrases as old person, older people, the old, etc. on my then-new blog and made it a test of my own commitment to exploring what getting old is really like to always refer to myself as old. I was 63 then (65 now) and at first, I flinched each time I wrote it. Few of us voluntarily admit to being old; it is almost un-American.
I stuck to my vow to avoid all euphemisms for old and surprise! Before too many weeks had passed, it felt as neutral and merely descriptive of a stage of life as “young†does when that adjective is aptly applied. Old had lost its negative connotation - for me, if not the culture at large. Repetition works, as all advertisers know.
Under the influence of the best book in print on aging (What Are Old People For? by William H. Thomas, M.D.), I occasionally dropped “elder†into my blog when I needed a synonym. It’s an old-fashioned word, hardly used anymore except in reference to tribal leaders. But I thought it was in need of resurrection and that it could be updated to mean, in addition to its inherent suggestion of wisdom, simply “old personâ€.
Then, one of the BlogHer co-founders Elisa Camahort, who is also a wordsmith extraordinaire, invited to me speak at SXSW in Austin early this year on a panel she had titled Respect Your Elderbloggers. It was an Aha! moment for me. The perfect word - like mommybloggers for women who blog about raising children – to describe bloggers of about 50 and older.
Now, in the months since last April, when I browbeat a reporter for The New York Times into using the word in the headline of a story about older bloggers, elder and elderblogger are being picked up by some others in mainstream media, by some bloggerss and by Chris Pirillo too in his bLaugh cartoon.
Language matters – a whole lot more than many people believe. Dr. Becca Levy of Yale University has been studying the effects of stereotyping on elders for many years:
“It turned out that people who had more positive views about aging were healthier over time,†wrote reporter Gina Kolata of Levy’s work in The New York Times recently. “They lived an average of 7.6 years longer than those of a similar age who did not hold such views, and even had less hearing loss when their hearing was tested three years after the study began…
“Still, Dr. Levy and others say it can be difficult to resist the pervasive stereotypes of aging. Many people may accept them without realizing it.
“’Then they become a self-fulfilling prophecy,’ Dr. Levy said."
In other words, prejudice against elders and negative stereotypes can making people sick and even kill them before their time.
We live in a profoundly ageist culture. One way to help change that is to change the language we use, and I’m grateful to the Blogher co-founders, Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort and Jory Des Jardines, for allowing me this space and for agreeing to name this new topic “Elders.â€
Contributing Editor Ronni Bennett also blogs at Time Goes By, What it’s really like to get older.
