Bright, pastel colors ribboned across the classroom walls—mounted with vibrant, cartoon posters and checkered reading charts. Arts and crafts projects hung from clothes pins and glossy, metallic wires—suspended above a drying rack layered with paper mache. A rainbow seating rug served as the centerpiece of the class, flanked by an array of faux wood tables with plastic blue chairs tucked underneath. I sat in the classroom, silently—my eyes fixated on the sterile white binder in front of me. The letters “ESL” stared back at me—bold and loud—before my instructor flipped open the cover, revealing the first page of my remedial lesson.
English wasn’t my first language growing up, a byproduct of being raised in a Taiwanese, immigrant household. I was routinely pulled away from my second grade classes for remedial English as a Second Language (ESL) lessons—one of three other students from my grade to be enrolled in the program. Every Tuesday, around 11:00 am, the ESL instructor would wait in the doorframe as I stuffed my bag with half finished grammar worksheets—proof of my struggle to master the language. The instructor would then guide me into an empty, after-school classroom—towing behind me an awkward deluge of stares from my peers—where she would drill me on vocabulary like “pointy” and “bacteria” before moving onto paired analogies and read alongs.
Thankfully, I graduated from ESL after a couple of months; however, my attempts at writing continued to remain clumsy throughout my earlier years of grade school. Defiling page after page with haphazard sentence structure and generic vocabulary felt tantamount to eco-terrorism—a tree cut down for this?
Naturally, improving my language capabilities, especially my writing, became important to me. In middle school, I took two years of creative writing—cultivating my writing style through a rudimentary exploration of genres ranging from poetry to sci-fi to creative non-fiction. In high school, I took advanced coursework in English—analyzing rhetoric, synthesizing passages, and writing argumentative essays. As an undergrad, I’ve started this blog to supplement my writing-intensive coursework in sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. And overtime, writing became more than just mastering basic semantics as I continued to experiment with rhetoric, diction, and compositional techniques.
Developing my skills was invigorating—empowering even. And soon, I realized that mastery over language is central to power itself.
The revelation that language is central to power is nothing novel—social scientists have longed argued this.
Symbolic interactionism, for example, posits that our ability to share and extract meaning and knowledge from others is derived from our ability to utilize a shared system of symbols—language. Linguistic determinism, on the other hand, argues that human thought and knowledge is restrained by the limits and structure of language. Therefore, our ability to name objects and people allows us to conceptualize them in our social reality.
Labels allow us to designate people as others, giving rise to almost every means of social categorization there is. The labels we attach to these groups carry weight, asserting power dynamics that last for centuries.
And language, powerful in both form and content, has fundamentally shaped human history. I think of John Winthrop’s City on a Hill, of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, or King’s I Had a Dream—words so powerful that they have resonated across space and time, inspiring revolutions and pushing societies to actualize truer, more fundamental ideals.
Of course, language is also a mechanism through which we maintain imbalances of power. Illiteracy has been weaponized to maintain hegemonic aristocracies while ethnonationalist rhetoric has roused genocide. History is often rewritten in the language of the oppressors, reshaping the context through which we live and experience the present. Slurs, too, embody the hate that oppressors project onto the marginalized.
Most of all, language is an art form—one of the purest forms of human expression.
Across all fields of social science: from history to anthropology to political science, language is central to power. To wield language is to wield power. And this power is not lost to gerontology.
Language as a form of power is a recurring motif in gerontological theory.
Stigmatizing Language
First and foremost, the language used to refer to older adults is often stigmatizing.
The colloquial use of the phrase “geriatric”, for example, in reference to older adults in non-healthcare settings is often weaponized to demean them. A splurge of other phrases in pop culture have arisen to ridicule older adults, from “OK Boomer” to “senior moment” to misuse of the word “senile”. Even now on Twitter, amidst the controversial (and very concerning) 2024 presidential debate, the use of deeply ageist rhetoric against older politicians is masked under the guise of humor.
Interestingly, phrases like “old” and “elderly”, while often well-intentioned, can also be stigmatizing. In fact, some of the older adults I work with vehemently dislike these labels because they come attached with stigmatizing representations of people their age. The elderly, for example, are often depicted as problematic or difficult—demonstrated by stereotypes like the curmudgeonly neighbor, the crazy cat lady, or the belligerent, demented nursing home patient. Other representations describe them as being chronically, monolithically impaired in their cognitive and physical abilities despite the fact that many older adults live active, healthy lives. Consequently, I’ve begun opting for the phrase “older adult” in recent years, or perhaps even “resident” if referring to someone in a facility.
To ameliorate some of this stigma, there’s been a trend—especially in clinical and public health settings—encouraging the use of person first language. Rather than saying “dementia patient”, for example, you say “person with dementia” or “person living with dementia”. In shuffling the semantics of this phrase by using person first language, you emphasize the person and not the condition. Otherwise, you define the person entirely by their diagnosis, reducing them down to a small piece of their larger composite. The very structure of a phrase or sentence can make the difference between stigmatizing versus empowering language.
Storytelling
In thinking of language and power in gerontology, I’m also reminded of the evolving role set expected of older adults as storytellers. Historically, older adults were revered in human societies for their role in storytelling—using their words to pass down knowledge and tradition to younger generations. Seen as religious leaders, wise men, gurus, sages, triable elders, etc. older adults were the transmitters and custodians of communal knowledge through their use of narrative and folklore. As a consequence of this role, older adults held immense influence over the decisions, traditions, and structures of their communities.
However, as societies began to adopt written, and now digital, language as the predominant way of preserving, retrieving, and conferring knowledge, older adults have been pushed away from this role and consequently from the value attached to it. Now, rather than listening to older adults—positioning them as central to the functions of larger society—the loss of their storytelling role has made it easier to deride them as burdens without purpose—shoveling them into the margins of society. In this way, we might consider language as a mechanism through which we confer or remove purpose and value.
As a storyteller myself, however, I can’t help but wonder if my decision to share the stories I have with older adults is—in some way—a form of complicity with removing older adults from their historical role as storytellers. As a younger adult highlighting the experiences of older adults, am I speaking for them—making it harder for them to tell their own stories, on their own terms? Worse, am I speaking over them? To what extent should I step back from my own vocality to allow older adults the opportunity to speak on their behalf?
Dementia and Language
My final thought here reaches back to my work in assisted living and memory care during the pandemic. For those of you who have read my essay Room 108, you might recall a conversation I had with Nancy, a resident who had forgotten her son because of her dementia. As her condition progressed, I watched Nancy forget pieces of herself—pieces of other people—until she was an incomplete picture of the person she once was. But dementia doesn’t merely impact our memory; it also impacts our language capabilities.
When Nancy first moved into assisted living, our conversations were colorful and expansive—a paradise of humorous anecdotes about her grandchildren or her growing collection of hand-knit garments. Her voice was soft, threaded together with a witty intellect as she floated from subject to subject. Her eyes gently scanned the room around her before settling on mine as she spoke—lighting up with every tangent or gesticulation she threw my way. However, as Nancy’s dementia progressed, my conversations with her grew shorter—more abrupt. I noticed it was harder for her to find the right words, often replacing them with incorrect stand-ins.
“I want to eat the … I’m trying to find the word,” she would say, “I think I mean ‘pink’ but I know that’s not right.”
“That’s alright, take all the time you need,” I would say, smiling back.
“Salmon! I mean salmon,” she replied.
But more often than not, she would give up on her words—on herself and her ability to find them. Her mouth would stumble into knots as she developed a stutter—words hidden behind locks. The composition of her sentences deteriorated, her vocabulary simplified, her speech had lost its tempo. Increasingly, I found myself simplifying my own sentences because she had a harder time understanding me.
Soon, speaking all-together became frustrating for her. And in her frustration, she would shut down, she stopped making eye contact—as if her energy drained away with every fragmented sentence she struggled to piece together. Dementia had taken away fundamental parts of her identity—her ability to connect with others and her ability to express herself.
Struggling with language growing up is what empowers me to keep writing. The voice I have cultivated for myself is central to who I am, and it inspires me to speak up.
As the philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, 1988, “A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.” To wield language is to wield power—use it wisely.