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,