Euphemising Ageing in Popular and Academic Publications on the Life Course: An Exploratory Study

According to age studies expert Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2004) the social ideology of ageing as decline—and concomitant anxiety—is affecting people increasingly early on in their lives. A linguistic way coping is through minimising threatening impact words. This paper focuses how life course scholars apply euphemisms refer age-related identities and issues. Additionally, background our inquiry are two questions: (1) whether these authors engage metalinguistic comment, (2) they explicitly acknowledge constitutive role language discourse. The conclusions suggest that there some explicit recognition significance use for attitudes behaviour related ageing. Besides personal choice euphemisms, have used other discursive means write non-evaluatively about ageing, well make informed comments strategies present public sphere, perceived euphemistic. Most importantly, this exploratory probe interdisciplinary context ways sensitively