Growing Old? and Aging
For too many years “senile” just meant old without being pejorative. Even “geriatric” was originally a value-free term rather than part of the lexicon of contempt toward old people. Yet today, the language used to describe the changing age makeup of the elderly population is short of an apocalypse.
Older people are likely to be seen as a burden and a drain on resources. Their only contribution, it seems, is to make worse the “dependency ratio,” a term that enshrines dubious assumptions about who will be financially dependent on whom.