When is it legitimate to call a character elderly? The character who raised this question was a 77-year-old elegant lady who acts half her age. (She's taking a 17-year-old great grand niece on a month-long vacation to China.)
When is it legitimate to call a character elderly? The character who raised this question was a 77-year-old elegant lady who acts half her age. (She's taking a 17-year-old great grand niece on a month-long vacation to China.)
When is it legitimate to call a character elderly?
When the character is more than double the median age of their country. For the US, the median age is 38. Double that would be 76.
Note: I wanted to say something like x standard deviations above the average age, but I couldn't find anything on line accessible for free that gives the standard deviation of the age distribution of the US population.
Note: all of my answers are relative to the United States. I suspect this varies a great deal from country to country.
Googling, the plurality of responses say 65+. There are outliers higher and lower, but that's the most common cutoff.
Legally, "Elder abuse" is legally defined as 65+ where I live. It likely varies state to state.
Statistically, I'm seeing a standard deviation of about 23. I'd tend to put one to one-and-a-half standard deviations as the elderly cutoff.
Taking a look at this document (2010-census based): https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf. It's got all sorts of interesting information. Page 3 has a great chart showing the age distribution. The US population is obviously nowhere near a normal distribution (which should be obvious, but I bet some people guess wrong on that). One interesting thing is that there's a very noticeable drop at 55 (easily the largest single-line drop). One could make a viable case for 55 based on that alone. Certainly 61 (one standard deviation or so) would be an easy marking point.
Then there's the social definition. Most people don't like being called 'elderly', so that tends to push the age up.
Beyond here I'm digressing, but it's an interesting topic.
Americans tend to call themselves 'young', many into their forties. 'Young Adult' groups are often (but not always) pitched at 20-39 year-olds. The point has oft been made that US society reached a point a decade or two ago (and remains at that point) where parents and children routinely are interested in the same bands, movies, and books, thus 'culturally' putting them in a similar band.
One can make a reasonable statistical case for some of this. Somewhat ignoring the problem that there are now many ages of 'adulthood' ranging from a low of 10 (ticket prices at some venues) to 25 (auto insurance, health coverage, etc), one can say that, nominally, 0-18 or possibly 0-22 are 'youth' (depending on what you consider college students, who are often not independent but are legally adults). That matches fairly well with age statistics.
The next band, 20-40, is 'young adult'. Again, that matches up with statistics.
40-60(ish) makes sense as 'middle age', leaving 60+ 'elderly'.
Americans tend to call themselves 'young', many into their forties.
Jimmy Carr made a joke about turning thirty that the only way he'd ever be called "young" again would be if he died.
On OP's topic I'd add that part of the problem with defining an age for elderly is that a lot of modern medicine has been pushing the age up. There are certain conditions which commonly affect the elderly and rarely affect the non-elderly: dementia, brittle bones, etc.
The age at which these most commonly start appearing has been late-50s to early 60s for centuries, but in the past few generations that has changed.
Similarly, there's a calculation along the line of "starting at age X, and each year thereafter, Y% of the population will die". This isn't just the big things like heart attacks, it's also complications from things that are minor at earlier ages, like getting pneumonia after having the flu. In the past century, X has gone up and Y has gone down.
So more people are living to older ages with better quality of life post 65 than in the past. This is causing a shift in the concept of what it means to be elderly.
leaving 60+ 'elderly'.
There seems to be a convention in the UK to call people in their 60s and early 70s middle-aged. But then the UK is a country where ageism is culturally endemic and nobody likes to be perceived as elderly.
AJ
Here's another answer (this applies to my mother and I tease her with it sometimes): When your kids are closer to retirement age than you are. :)
In the US, elderly is synonymous with "Older individual" for purposes of the law. Which is set at 60 years old currently.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840&height=800&iframe=true&def_id=42-USC-303298853-1860968387&term_occur=999&term_src=
I may have grown older, but I refuse to grow up!
Mentally maybe, but age and gravity are equal opportunity ass kickers.
I can still work circles around people half my age, but I'm far from my prime.
When is it legitimate to call a character elderly?
A comedian once said, "Someone is old when they are 20 years older than you."
When is it legitimate to call a character elderly?
For some reason I can see the 77 year old complaining to her great-grand-niece as follows:
"Your grandpa thought I was old when I used to babysit him, when I was not much older than you are now. It got worse when I took your mom to the capital one summer when she was about your age. While even the g-d-mm government calls me elderly now, I sure don't feel that way."
I'm on the backside of 65, all of my students call me old. They are all in the 14-18 range, so I think the question is perspective dependent.
Is there a difference between "old" and "elderly"? Is be okay with "old" by the late-60s, with "elderly" starting sometime in the 76-80 range. The two words carry different connotations in my mind.
Is be okay with "old" by the late-60s
Late 60s? In my WIP novel, which begins in 1956, a 15-yo girl is watching Elvis doing his bump 'n grind at the end of the song "Hound Dog" on the Milton Berle show. The story is being narrated by the girl much later in life (like "The Green Mile" does). This is what I wrote:
I knew he would be old. Not ancient like my father, but he was a grown-up. All the singers were. I mean, gosh, he was twenty-one. That's old to a fifteen-year-old girl.
Does anyone use the word "elderly" in their normal speech? I hear people say "old", "real old", "very old", but not elderly. The only time I hear anything similar is when dealing with claims of "elder abuse."
On a side note, I got a haircut today. When I asked what I owed, my barber, a woman in her late 20s, asked if I was a "senior" for the reduced price. At 71, it's flattering- until I look in the mirror.
Does anyone use the word "elderly" in their normal speech?
In my experience, it does get used, but only when talking about senior citizens as a group, as in "the elderly".
Does anyone use the word "elderly" in their normal speech? I hear people say "old", "real old", "very old", but not elderly.
To me 'elderly' describes a behavior rather than an actual age. (But I may be wrong, English isn't my first language.)
From Wiktionary:
Adjective
elderly (comparative more elderly, superlative most elderly)
1. old; having lived for relatively many years.
2. Of an object, being old-fashioned or frail due to aging.
The second applied on a person is what I associate when reading of an elderly person.
HM.
I don't think of myself as elderly, except on the rare occasion when I forget and look in a mirror. Then I wonder, who in hell would put a horny 14 year old mind in a body like that!
It's those times I really hate time travel.
Gary