The Pragmatics Of Ag(E)Ing
Jacob L. Mey
University of Southern Denmark
There is a need to make a distinction between 'aging', the natural process by which animals (including ourselves) become older (and in the process, lose some of their usual qualities), and ‘ageing’ (spelt with an extra -e-), which I will use to denote the societally developed, human attitude-based view of older people as less attractive, less readily available, less important socially, less worthy of our attention, more easily disposable, and so on. Whereas ‘aging’ in itself does not connote or necessarily trigger ‘ageing’, the tendency has been to consider all ‘aged’ persons as subject to the criticisms and negative attitudes pertaining to (old) ‘age’ and commonly embodied in 'ageing'.
In a recent contribution, Justine Coupland (2013; see also Coupland & Coupland, 1993) has drawn attention to the fact that even in contexts such as the family, actual aging occurs in different modes and tempi, and that ‘ageing’ in particular manifests itself, often unobserved and unconsciously, in the varying values we attribute to aging people. She points to the fascinating phenomenon of young people arranging ‘granny parties’, where the participants (mostly women) dress up as older, grandmotherly types, and play-act the demeanor and speech of self-styled ‘grannies’, imitating minute details of everyday mundane acts such as walking, drinking tea, making conversation, and dancing to ‘their’ music.
While all this is mostly done in a humoristic fashion, two questions come to mind: first, is not the fact that we create a category of ‘older’ people as different from, and less valuable than younger persons, not in itself a manifestation of ‘ageism? And two, why is it that ‘grannyhood’, being acceptable and even worthy of being imitated, contrasts unfavorably with its less popular counterpart, ‘grandpadom’ – witness, among other things, that male partners rarely appear at granny parties, not to speak of the fact that ‘grandpa parties’ (young adults dressing up as older men) are far from being as common as granny parties.
The present paper will delve into the pragmatics of these phenomena by positing that ageism actually is a special kind of racism, understood as ‘seeing and treating a certain kind of people as not only different from, but inferior t one’s own kind based on the physical attributes they are exhibiting (such as physical deterioration caused by of age). parallel to discrimination because of skin color and other physical attributes, likewise thought to signal, or even cause mental and other incompetencies).
References
Coupland, Justine. 2014. The granny: Public representations and creative performance. Pragmatics & Society 4(1): 82–104
Coupland, Nikolas and Justine Coupland. 1993. Discourses of ageism and anti-ageism. Journal of Aging Studies