What’s in a name?

I always have a discussion with my students about the name we use to refer to our clients: “senior citizen”, “elderly”, “elder” or “person who is older.” I know there’s been discussions periodically about whether elder law attorneys should describe themselves (and their practices) in that way. So I was very interested in a recent study from researchers at the National University of Ireland, Gallway. Trends in the use of terms to describe older people in the medical literature 1950 – 2015 explains the researchers study and their conclusion that over time the word used has changed, with “older” being the current favored term. Here is a brief explanation:

Background: There has been much debate about the most appropriate terms to use when describing older people. We examined changes in the popularity of different terms in the medical literature from 1950 to 2015.
Methods: The advanced search facility in PubMed was used to search titles and abstracts of the clinical English-language literature for use of ‘geriatric’, ‘aged’, ‘old’, ‘older’ and ‘elderly’ to describe older people.
Results: ‘Aged’ was the most popular term from 1950 to 1961 but declined to 3.4% of references to older people in 2015. ‘Geriatric’ was relatively common (more than 10% of references) from 1955 to 1976 but occurred in only 1.8% of references by 2015. ‘Elderly’ was the most popular term for all but one year from 1962 to 2007 and accounted for 37.8% of references in 2015. ‘Older’ was been the most popular term from 2008 to 2015, when it accounted for 54.6% of references.
Conclusions: The preferred descriptive terms for older people have changed greatly over the last 65 years. ‘Older’ is now the most common descriptor and is increasingly displacing ‘elderly’ which had dominated for four decades. 

The study has been published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (subscription required)