One of the nice things about getting old these days is that you no longer become an old person. You become a senior citizen. Another is that we old people—wait, we seniors—are able to discern the sudden and sweeping changes in manners and morals and politics that seem to a young person to be just ordinary facts of life.
Take for example the words in common use today. No, I am not referring to the big, Orwellian manipulations, as in “the sex assigned at birth” or “diversity in higher education.” Cynical propaganda has long been with us, and we seniors are not surprised by it. What is dismaying to us is the everyday stuff. Remember how President Obama, the urbane and highly educated leader, used that word stuff? Even in a lofty speech on the deterioration of public discourse, he observed, “People just make stuff up.” Or how we never talk to anyone anymore; no, we “reach out” to them. And how there are no longer difficulties or problems—just “challenges”?
Because I listen to NPR in the mornings while doing my daily regime of stretches (one of the opportunities that we senior citizens often have), I am particularly struck by how “You’re welcome” has gone the way of the dodo bird. The interviewer ends by thanking their (I’ll get to the use of “their”) guest, and the guest replies, “Thank you.” Needless to say, this could go on a long time but for some reason it doesn’t. The sense of mind-numbing repetition and niceness, by the way, is then reinforced as the host introduces the next report with a chirpy greeting, “Hey, Sam . . . ” to which Sam replies, “Hey, Melinda . . . ” And yes, the ungrammatical “their” has almost completely replaced the more precise “his” and “her,” presumably because it is less precise.
Once you start noting these new usages, you find them everywhere. Perhaps even if you are young, you have noticed how often what we reach out to these days is a community. Our society is just full of communities—the “intelligence community” is one of the more unlikely ones. In my town we even have a “homeless community.” As these examples suggest, our happy references to “communities” began to multiply just as actual communities all but disappeared. Since most people today would not recognize a real community if they happened to stumble into one, labeling all sorts of groups as communities is probably reassuring.
Also, today we often avoid plain assertions, such as “I believe she is correct,” in favor of the mushier: “It feels like she is correct.” Relatedly, we are “comfortable” in saying or in concluding things, with our comfort often suspiciously proportional to the doubtfulness of the claim. This resort to subjectivity, however, is not accompanied by any loss of certainty. Indeed, the word absolutely is thrown around in what feels like exact proportion to our metastasizing sense that agreement on anything is impossible.
New usages persist even if they create obvious confusions. Thus, “wife” and “husband” were replaced for a while by the more anodyne but still clear “spouse.” But that word was not anodyne enough and had to be replaced by “significant other,” which could apply to your beloved dog. But “significant other” was an awkward term that was obviously an artificial substitute for “spouse,” which in turn had the disadvantage of a denotative meaning. So we have moved from “significant other” to “partner,” which works well because it is not awkward and has the additional advantage of being downright confusing and possibly misleading.
Yes, it is true, we elderly folks can get a bit dyspeptic. (Even “folks,” come to think of it, sounds condescending and falsely familiar.) Why should small changes in phrasing bother anyone? Well, in my case it may have to do with my habit of listening to NPR each morning. More generally, it may have to do with a suspicion that is common among us grumpy senior citizens.
The suspicion, as you may have guessed, is that something besides our own vitality is in decline. We Americans have long been known as an informal, optimistic people who deep in our bones are devoted to the idea of equality. Those are things we old people love about the country we have become used to over the years. It seems a shame to see those very attributes degenerate into phony cheerfulness, inappropriate and false informality, purposeful and insistent obfuscation, and a loopy unwillingness to face even simple, small truths.
