A few years ago, Joan G. Silberman, who teaches English at Rockland Community College in Suffern, N.Y., offered a summer course titled "The Literature of Old Age."
Nobody signed up.The next year, she tried again, but this time she called the course "Let's Talk About Aging." There wasn't an empty chair.
Silberman was delighted with the result of the name change, but dismayed by the necessity of making it.
"We need to rescue the word `old,' " she said. "Look, I'm 72. I work out for an hour every day, teach full time and am appropriately compensated. I have loads of friends just like me. If `old' simply means we've spent a lot of years on this planet, that's fine. But as long as the society says it really means bored and weak and depressed and ugly, the word is nothing but a slur."
Raised to worship youth, Americans are fearful of aging and turned off by everything related to it, says Jerry D. Feezel, who teaches communications at Kent State University. As a result, we're continually devising names for the old that avoid the O-word itself: "senior citizen" and "seasoned citizen," "golden ager" and "silver fox," "mature American" and "retired person" - not to mention forthrightly negative terms like "geezer" and "biddy."
What is the best term? Gerontologists and other experts admit to considerable confusion over the matter, and no wonder. Finding a single, universally accepted term to encompass all the various ways of being old could never have been easy. The remarkable changes in the longevity and lifestyles of older people in the past several decades have complicated the task.
Individual diversity increases with age - the longer you live, the more unique experiences you have, the more different you are from the next person. That makes individual members of today's long-lived older set harder to pigeonhole. Where is the word or phrase that can distinguish those 65 and over from the rest of society at a time when the older group includes so many marathon runners, computer hackers and general gadabouts?
In the gerontology trade, the phrases of choice are "older persons" or "older people," which James M. Thompson, a gerontologist at the American Association of Retired Persons, describes as dynamic, by contrast with "old," which he sees as suggesting finality, or "elderly," which implies frailty.
What raises Thompson's hackles, and those of many experts and older people, are terms they see as condescending or euphemistic. "Senior citizen" conjures up images of pinochle and rocking chairs, they say, and they don't see that much golden about being a golden ager.
In fact, when you ask people over 65 what they prefer to call themselves, their answers have remained fairly constant over the past 20 years.
Back in 1975, Louis Harris & Associates gave a list of 10 alternatives to people 65 and over around the country. Asked to choose the label they'd prefer, the No. 1 answer was "mature American," followed by "retired person" and then the dreaded "senior citizen." The least popular terms were were "old man" and "old woman."
A decade later, Feezel conducted a similar poll in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and he got pretty much the same answers. Again, "mature American" was the top choice - if a less familiar one. Next came "retired person" and "senior citizen." Not surprisingly, "old folks," "biddy" and "fogey" came in last.
A recent, most unscientific sampling of a few dozen older people on Seniornet, an online site, suggested that some euphemisms are still popular. Pearl127 had a typical response: " `Senior' and/or `senior citizen' are fine with me. I've been called a lot worse."
A few alternatives were offered. BetCapulet, for example, wrote: "I'm kind of partial to `elders.' I guess it's the connotation of `and betters.' " Only one person reacted with anger. That was ConnieAct, who wrote: "I object to all the terms used to identify us. I think we harm ourselves when we put up with any titles including `seniors.' We are people, without any embellishments or qualifiers."
Over the years, experts have devised a variety of names. Bernice Neugarten, a leading social scientist at the University of Chicago, proposed using the age 75 as a dividing line between the young old and the old old, and many scientists follow her lead. In some circles, the years from 50 to 75 are called the third quarter or third stage of life. Advertisers have also coined a few terms, including "opals," for older people with active life styles, and "rappies," for retired affluent professionals.
None of these alternatives, including "older people," has won over Silberman of Rockland College. "Older than what?" she demanded. "My 9-year-old grand-daughter is older than her 8-year-old friend. It's simply a way of evading the fact that my granddaughter is young and I am old."
We are brought up, Silberman said, to see old age as a disease; we distance ourselves from older people rather than accepting them simply as ourselves at a later point in life. As long as that continues, she said, "it doesn't make much difference what they call us."