By Simon Bottery, Director of Fundraising, Policy and Communications
Went to an interesting seminar today run by the nice people at Forster on communicating with older people. ‘Older people’ seems to have become the most common way of describing people who a few years ago would have been ‘pensioners’ or ‘senior citizens’ or just ‘old people’.
But it struck me today that I have no idea what it is that they are ‘older’ than. I thought at first it must be older than the average age but The Office for National Statistics says the average age in the UK is 39. Since no one includes 40-year-olds in the category ‘older people’ (Independent Age helps those over 70 though some organisations set the bar as low as 50) we are clearly not meaning ‘older than the average’.
So what do we mean? Older than me? Older than you? Older than the age a typical police officer looks? I have a terrible suspicion we mean ‘old’ but are saying older’ because it sounds nicer.
photo posed by model, courtesy of hortongrou at www.sxc.hu
Hi Simon
ReplyDeleteGlad you liked the session!
Inspired by your comments, I too had a look at the ONS site.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=6
I liked this graph, which shows that after the 40ish peak you've identified, there's a second spike for women at 60 (matched by a slightly smaller spike for men). So there's a statistical peg on which to hang the definition of 'older' as 'over 60'.
However, surely the point of all these euphemisms is surely to move away from crude measures such as chronological age and receipt of pensions towards more sophisticated categorisation of this group?