Aged Care Insite Issue 114 | Aug-Sep 2019 | Page 24

practical living Mind your language How choice of words affects aged care. By Conor Burke W ords are something we use every day without much thought. But language and the way we use it has also been shown to shape the way we think about space, time and colours, and how we construe events or experience emotion, among many other things. For example, speakers of certain Aboriginal languages may have more sophisticated spatial awareness than non- Aboriginal speakers. When talking about where they are, they do not use front or back, left or right, but north, south, east and west. Speakers of languages like Russian or Spanish can view objects differently due to gendered grammar. A Stanford University article found that in the world of art, depictions of death are predicated on the artist’s native language. German painters are more likely to paint death as a male, while Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman. Language can also be used to marginalise. Think of the different words 20 agedcareinsite.com.au used to describe refugees. Some say migrants. Some says illegals. Some use the phrase boat people. Each term brings with it a different meaning. Now think of words some people use for older people. Bag. Old codger. Fogey. Coffin dodger. Or the phrase often used to talk about our ageing population, the so-called grey tsunami – a devastating altogether terrible occurrence. University of South Australia linguist Jonathan Crichton argues that the language we use affects the way society treats certain people. And to understand this, we need to understand how language works in this sense. “Think about language: it’s the primary means by which anyone can articulate what they want to say, but it’s also the primary way in which people articulate their experience in the sense of breaking the world up into meaningful chunks,” he tells Aged Care Insite. “So you’ve got ‘articulate’ in two senses there. You’ve got articulate as express, and articulate like a skeleton articulates at the joints.” In the first sense, we are articulating a thought or opinion, or a joke, like calling someone an old fart. But deeper down, that joke is segregating this person from others. “Language becomes more deeply implicated in the way we treat people if you think about it in the second sense of articulate, which is the way you chop up the world – including people – into meaningful bits,” Crichton says. “If it is provided for you by the only language that you’ve got, then that means that the bits may prosper or perish depending on how they’re chopped up.” Crichton believes that the use of language is often imbued with political, social and historical ideas. “At the moment around, say, the refugee area, there’s not just a struggle of ideas, there’s a parallel, and in a way that’s even more important because it’s a less obvious struggle around how these ideas and policies are articulated.” Using this kind of language creates groupings of people, eliminating the individuality of some and emphasising the otherness of their group – what is better about one group over another. Studies looking into ageist language have found that we “dehumanise” the elderly with language, “thereby making it easier to oppress this group”. If members of this group are not conforming to desired societal traits, the study says,