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Do you know the dirty words for old age?

"Old" has a connotation among the young that doesn't exist for the group it represents, a study shows.

By STEPHEN NOHLGREN
Published March 12, 2005

PHILADELPHIA - Adriane Berg recently wrote a financial planning book she wanted to call How to Have a Great Old Age.

The publisher wouldn't hear of it, the 53-year-old New Jersey author said this week. The title would contain no hint of "old."

The book came out this year as How Not to Go Broke At 102.

What makes the concept of "old" or "old age" so radioactive?

In a National Council on Aging study three years ago, half the people between 65 and 74 thought of themselves as middle-aged, as did a third of people over 75.

What's wrong with "old age"?

Janice Wassel, gerontologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has no ready answer. But her linguistic research suggests that society's frequent avoidance of the word "old" leads to something worse: a contorted language that can anger the very people it is intended to soothe.

Wassel, 54, looked up in a thesaurus all the words that apply to different age groups. Then she surveyed people, both young and old, about the images and emotions those words evoke.

Infants nearly got a free ride. Fifteen of 16 words describing them were deemed positive. Everyone liked "cherubs," "babies" and "bambinos." Only "preemie" fared poorly.

Toddlers evoked more neutral images, though the six positive words, including "peewee" and "tyke," outdistanced the one negative: "brat."

Even teenagers overcame "punk" and "teenaged juvenile" to score more positive words than negative.

But something changes in middle age. Only one of 10 phrases, "prime of life," was considered positive, vs. seven negative phrases, including "middle life."

"I don't know what happens to us at middle age," Wassel said, speaking at a joint meeting of the National Council on Aging and American Society on Aging in Philadelphia. "But it's a sad statement of how we perceive people as they grow older."

Words that applied to the oldest group took a different twist. With all other age groups, survey respondents generally agreed whether a term was positive, negative or neutral. When assessing the older group, though, opinions about words often split along generational lines.

People age 54 or younger apparently saw "old" as a pejorative, Wassel said. Fourteen of 16 phrases containing the word "old" were deemed negative. Only "old gentleman" and "old person" evoked a neutral image.

But respondents 55 and older liked many of the images, such as "old chap," "old dog," "old granny," and "older generation." The only negatives containing the word "old" were "dirty old man," "old maid," "old woman" and "the old."

What older people really didn't like were the words society has created while trying not to call them old.

Retiree? Nope. Elderly? Nope. Senior citizen? Not a chance. Meanwhile, younger people saw these surrogate words as either positive or neutral.

Older and younger respondents could agree on only a third of the words describing older people. Younger people thought "no spring chicken" and "over-the-hill gang" were insults. Older people liked those phrases.

"Young people and older people aren't speaking the same language. That's a problem," Wassel said. "This is important because of social changes that are coming. We will have people in their 70s in the work force, working with people in their 20s and 30s.

"We have to come up with a language that works and is respectful to all of us."

AARP figured it out five years ago when it dropped "retired" from its name and became just AARP. What used to be senior citizen centers in Nebraska are now active adult centers. The Barnstable Senior Center in Massachusetts is about to become the Barnstable Center: A Center for Lifelong Learning.

Language depends on the context, said Phyllis Rule, 76, who works for the National Council on Aging in Michigan. "When we go to breakfast, you see us sitting there with gray hair, we can call each other old and crack jokes. That doesn't mean I would appreciate someone many years younger than me saying I'm old. I prefer to be called mature or a work in progress."

Worse than words themselves, conferencegoers said, are the ways some younger people treat older people in misguided, condescending attempts to be sympathetic.

A waitress calls someone "sweetie" or "honey" but doesn't use those terms to customers in their 30s or 40s.

Or they refer to an older person as "young man" or "young lady."

Or they dole out exuberant praise in response to a mundane task, like parents do when a picky-eating child cleans his or her plate.

To the extent that society sometimes needs labels, Wassel suggested "older adult" to describe someone in the later stages of life. As a role model, she recalled a telephone conversation a few years ago with her mother, who had just turned 77.

Hearing her mother refer to herself as old, Wassel said she hemmed and hawed, trying to politely deflect the issue. Finally, her mother interrupted.

"She said, "Janice, it's okay that I'm old. I never thought I would be this old. I never thought that I would be this healthy. I never thought I would have this much fun. It's okay that I'm old. I wish it for you."'

Stephen Nohlgren, 56, can be reached at nohlgren@sptimes.com or 727 893-8442.

[Last modified March 12, 2005, 00:50:11]