Euphemising Ageing in Popular and Academic Publications on the Life Course: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

According to age studies expert Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2004) the social ideology of ageing as decline—and the concomitant anxiety—is affecting people increasingly early on in their lives. A linguistic way of coping is through minimising the threatening impact of words. This paper focuses on how life course scholars apply euphemisms to refer to age-related identities and issues. Additionally, in the background of our inquiry are two questions: (1) whether and how these authors engage in metalinguistic comment, and (2) whether they explicitly acknowledge the constitutive role of language and discourse. The conclusions suggest that there is some explicit recognition of the significance of language use for the social attitudes and behaviour related to ageing. Besides their personal choice of euphemisms, authors have used other discursive means to write non-evaluatively about ageing, as well as make informed comments about strategies present in the public sphere, perceived as euphemistic. Most importantly, this exploratory paper is to probe the interdisciplinary context of the ways scholars refer sensitively to ageing.