Geriatric is precise, but sounds far too clinical.
Retiree doesn’t apply to an older person who never worked or hasn’t stopped working, and, further, can suggest that someone’s employment status is her defining feature. Aging is accurate but vague-everyone is aging all the time. Other, less common words don’t seem fit for everyday use either. “The fact that people don’t often voluntarily relate to this term is a strong reason to not apply it to them.” “If you ask a room of people at a senior center who there is a member of ‘the elderly,’ you might get only reluctant hands or none,” Clara Berridge, a gerontologist at the University of Washington School of Social Work, posited in an email. Meanwhile, elderly, a term that was more common a generation ago, is hardly neutral-it’s often associated with frailty and limitation, and older people generally don’t identify with it. (Of course, the word senior can also be used to signify experience and endow prestige-as in senior vice president of marketing-but not all older people interpret it that way in the context of later life.) Additional knocks against the term include its potential ambiguity (inconveniently, it’s also the term for fourth-year high schoolers) and frequent imprecision (it’s often paired with the word citizen, even though not every older resident of the U.S. “Think about voters from 18 to 25 … Imagine if a newspaper called them juniors instead of young voters,” she said. To her, senior implies that people who receive the label are different, and somehow lesser, than those who don’t. “ Senior is one of the most common euphemisms for old people, and happens to be the one I hate the most,” Jacoby told me. In general, those terms tend to be fraught or outmoded. The word is gaining popularity not because it is perfect-it presents problems of its own-but because it seems to be the least imperfect of the many descriptors English speakers have at their disposal. So if 65-year-olds-or 75-year-olds, or 85-year-olds-aren’t “old,” what are they? As Jaffe’s phrasing suggests, American English speakers are converging on an answer that is very similar to old but has another syllable tacked on as a crucial softener: older. There’s no one term that can conjure up that variety.” Some are traveling around the world, some are raising their grandchildren, and they represent as many as three different generations. “Some are working, some are retired, some are hitting the gym every day, others suffer with chronic disabilities. “Older adults now have the most diverse life experiences of any age group,” Ina Jaffe, a reporter at NPR who covers aging, told me in an email. This linguistic strain has only gotten more acute as average life spans have grown longer and, especially for wealthier people, healthier.
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. Read: What happens when we all live to 100? “I wouldn’t say is old,” says Susan Jacoby, the author of Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age, “but I know it’s not middle age-how many 130-year-olds do you see wandering around?” Overall, two-thirds of the Marist Poll respondents considered 65 to be “middle-aged” or even “young.” These classifications are a bit perplexing, given that, well, old age has to start sometime. It seems that the closer people get to old age themselves, the later they think it starts.
Sixty percent of the youngest respondents-those between 18 and 29-said yes, but that percentage declined the older respondents were only 16 percent of adults 60 or older made the same judgment.
It’s a label that people tend to shy away from: In 2016, the Marist Poll asked American adults if they thought a 65-year-old qualified as old. Of course, calling someone old is generally not considered polite, because the word, accurate though it might be, is frequently considered pejorative. That’s how life progresses: You’re young, you’re middle-aged, then you’re old. Once people are past middle age, they’re old.
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