Warren Wood is old. He\u2019s proud he\u2019s old. He advertises the fact that he is old by wearing a cap that says UFO in red letters. \u201cWhat\u2019s UFO?\u201d people ask. \u201cUnited Flying Octogenarians,\u201d Wood, 86, of Carmel, CA, happily responds.<\/p>\n
All members of UFO\u2014an international organization that Wood is president of\u2014 had a pilot\u2019s license on or after their 80th birthday. \u201cWe still have our wits about us. We can still carry on a conversation,\u201d he says. \u201cWe take pride in the fact that we grew old but we didn\u2019t grow old.\u201d<\/p>\n
And there\u2019s the crux. You can call them old, but don\u2019t call them old. Because old is bad\u2014even when you\u2019re proudly old. Right?<\/p>\n
Well, Pat McGill, 71, isn\u2019t old. She\u2019s seasoned. \u201cAnybody that\u2019s old is just somebody that\u2019s older than me,\u201d says the South Dakota speaker, trainer and consultant.<\/p>\n
Ashton Applewhite, 64, is an older\u2014a term she coined in 2012. \u201cIt is short. Everyone understands what it means. It is value-neutral,\u201d says the anti-ageism activist, blogger and author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism (2016). Besides, \u201cI got tired of typing \u2018older Americans.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Seniors, older adults, mature Americans\u2014all sorts of terms and euphemisms have been proposed to describe people of a certain age. Nothing has been universally accepted, despite quite a bit of debate, especially over the last decade or so.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a discussion that\u2019s going on in the aging community,\u201d says Karyne Jones, president and CEO of the National Caucus and Center on Black Aging. \u201cEverybody wants a different title, but they don\u2019t want people to label them so that it makes them old.\u201d Her organization most often uses the terms seniors, senior citizens and older workers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe question of what should we call this group has been bubbling up more frequently,\u201d says Susan Donley, publisher and managing director of Next Avenue, a PBS-associated website for older people. \u201cI think it\u2019s because people are starting to pay more attention to this group, and this group is starting to get larger.\u201d<\/p>\n
By that, she means the boomers have arrived. Now ages 53 to 71, people in the massive boomer generation are getting to be what some might call old, though certainly not old.<\/p>\n
In boomers\u2019 lifetimes, old has connoted declining, decrepit and irrelevant. So too, to varying extents, have related words, like senior and\u2014shudder\u2014elderly.<\/p>\n
And one thing nobody but nobody wants to do is offend the boomers. These 75 million older adults bring money, power and influence. Newspapers and magazines depend on them as subscribers; local governments woo them for tourism and retirement relocation; independent-living communities (no longer \u201cretirement homes\u201d) need them to move in; manufacturers need them to buy.<\/p>\n
But not one of these groups has yet figured out what to call them. All they know is boomers are not their parents, and nobody had better imply otherwise.<\/p>\n
The \u2018Senior\u2019 Problem<\/strong><\/p>\n For a number of years, senior and senior citizen were among the most commonly used terms for older people. But \u201ccalling Sting [at age 65] a senior citizen just seems wrong,\u201d says Donley, summing up how a lot of boomers feel on the subject. For them, senior implies rocking chairs and golf. And that doesn\u2019t fit how they see themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cMany seniors\u2014especially the younger seniors\u2014don\u2019t like to be called seniors because it reminds them of older people like their own parents or grandparents,\u201d says Manoj Pardasani, PhD, an associate professor at the Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service. \u201cSomeone who\u2019s 60, 65 today looks and feels and acts very differently than someone [of the same age] 30, 40 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n The perceived revulsion against senior is so strong that some service providers, in an effort to connect with these young-olds, have changed their names to omit the term.<\/p>\n Starting about 10 or 15 years ago, many \u201csenior centers\u201d in particular were seeing enrollment rates drop, says Pardasani, who has spent much of his academic life studying these meal-and-activity providers and who\u2019s on the board of directors for Bronx House, which runs such a facility in New York. So some centers decided to change their names and omit the word senior altogether, becoming, for example, \u201ccommunity centers.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf society wasn\u2019t ageist, we\u2019d be totally fine with being old.<\/strong><\/p>\n –Ashton Applewhite<\/strong><\/p>\n But a funny thing happened. The name changes alone didn\u2019t bring in the seniors, Pardasani says. What did work were major overhauls: centers that changed their programming and updated their facilities, along with changing their names, have been the ones to see noticeable enrollment increases.<\/p>\n As senior centers found, it\u2019s not just the traditional labels that boomers are rejecting but the lifestyle that stereotypically comes with them.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not my mother\u2019s 70,\u201d says McGill, the speaker in South Dakota. \u201cThe baby boomers are going to be the generation wearing the blue jeans. We\u2019re not going to be playing bingo; we\u2019re going to be dancing\u2014and, if possible,\u201d she adds, laughing, \u201csmoking a little marijuana.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe longevity boom has created a new stage of life for a lot of people,\u201d Donley says. \u201cIf you\u2019re lucky, you\u2019ve got 20 or 30 healthy and productive years that fall after traditional retirement. I think that we\u2019re figuring out as a society what that means and how we take advantage of that\u2014and, as individuals, how are we going to live with purpose? Those are giant questions. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s that surprising that we don\u2019t quite have the vocabulary for it yet.\u201d<\/p>\n