Looking forward to fifty

I’m going to be turning fifty, this year. I don’t feel it. I don’t know whether to grow old gracefully or disgracefully. I’ve always been indecisive.

I looked up stuff about age last week (because I am sensitive about age now) and I learned so much! Some of the things I learned were…

You’re not allowed to say ‘elderly’ anymore. ‘Senior citizen’ is out and ‘retired’ is out the door. You can’t say ‘geriatric’ and I think that’s quite fair. ‘Pensioner’ is outdated and ‘advanced age’ – don’t go there. ‘Old people?’ No, can’t do that, as it euphemizes age. And that euphemism is negative, if you’ve lived a lot of days. So, what are we to do, to show respect for all the years? How do we put a stop to all our politically correct fears?

A lot of these words were bandied about, in certain times and phases but now ‘fossil’, ‘fogey’ and ‘codger’ are out, they’re not P.C phrases. ‘Older adult’ or ‘older person’ is the acceptable term these days, or simply ‘man’ or simply ‘woman’, followed by their age.

It’s about time, the PC World (not the computer store) said something nice about me, so if I’m an ‘older adult,’ then that’s what I’m happy to be.

5 thoughts on “Looking forward to fifty”

cabrogal says:

March 15, 2019 at 11:44 am

Of course by the time you’re sixty ‘older adult’ will be dated and offensive and the PC brigade will have invented new euphemisms about us doddery old coots to enforce.

I don’t know whether to grow old gracefully or disgracefully.

Failing to follow the advice of The Who is always disgraceful (not to mention embarrassing).
Roger, Pete and John are/were disgraceful. Keith wasn’t.
But you weren’t around in ’65, so I guess it’s not your generation.

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1. Sue Young says:
  
  March 21, 2019 at 10:17 pm
  
  Thanks Cabrogal. Your reply made me laugh out loud. I’m not going to say LOL. (Damn, just said it). I’m wondering though, having grown up in the late seventies, early eighties, how I might expect to grow old, as opposed to the Jaggers and Townsends of this world. Maybe not gracefully or disgracefully but selfishly, as the yuppie age of the time may suggest? I hope not, as I hated all that but the music was good and so were the movies. I’d quite like to grow old in an ‘American Werewolf In London’ type of way.
  
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  1. cabrogal says:
    
    March 22, 2019 at 12:59 am
    
    I’m wondering though, having grown up in the late seventies, early eighties, how I might expect to grow old
    
    Well, as an old punker who’s failed to self-destruct thus far, I generally go for ‘angry yet apathetic’. It has an enduring, informal appeal I could probably carry off in a nursing home if need be.
    
    I hope the younger generations appreciate how much easier we’ve made it for them with our faux anti-consumerist faux revolutions. They now have less reason than ever to think about getting old.
    
    Fun fact: Keith Moon was invited to play at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics. If he’d shuffled up he’d still have been better than John Bonham ever was.
    
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  2. Sue Young says:
    
    March 31, 2019 at 9:50 pm
    
    If these people, in positions of power still think Keith Moon is alive, then what hope have we got?
    No doubt they still think his old drinking pal, Oliver Reed, is still alive and kicking.
    
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Judy Eun Kyung Kim says:

March 22, 2019 at 5:50 am

I think grower older is getting wiser, the wise woman is a sage. I think it’s a celebratory rite of passage.

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