At what age does an elder become elderly?

Ignore Trump, if you can. Forget the stumble President Joe Biden made, tripping over a sandbag before handing out medals. Or look past his NATO gaffes, where he confused Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky with Vladimir Putin.

Bungles happen to the best of us. Distracted, we misjudge a step, just as Joe did on Air Force One in February – twice. Or we muddle A Streetcar Named Desire with A Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (my senior moment last week), since both Tennessee Williams plays radiate heat, not to mention their mixable cat/car subject.

Joe Biden pulled out of his bid for a second term after a series of high-profile missteps.Credit: AP

The root cause of Biden quitting the election race, with Kamala Harris all but certain to replace him at the top of the Democratic ticket, depends on a syllable. A suffix, in fact, since a gulf lies between elder and elderly. As the truism goes, “It’s the difference between falling, and having a fall.” The essence is agency, where the elder exercises prerogative, the elderly are given physio exercises, whether they like it or not.

Joe Biden is 81. No spring chicken, but an accomplished statesman all the same, a charming operator, a steadying influence. Until the world – and George Clooney – decided he wasn’t, that insidious -ly suffix subsequently sealing his fate.

Testing things on X, I asked when a person becomes elderly. The responses reflected our fears. Kathryn Forward summed it up: “I’m 71, and if someone called me elderly, I’d whack them with my cane, throw my false teeth at them, and then run them over with my wheelie-walker.”

Kasia Bail, a professor of gerontological nursing at the University of Canberra, added: “Here at the Centre for Ageing Research and Translation, we use ‘older’ (older person, older adult) for people over age 65 (or 45 for First Nations people). WHO recommends avoiding ‘senior’ or ‘elderly’ as they can be stigmatising terms.”

That stigma lies in our dread, as British journalist A.A. Gill observed when visiting his father’s nursing home. “Ageing is so frightening in part because we treat the old so badly, and we treat them badly because we’re so frightened of them. We ignore them and consign them to horrible solitude because we can’t face the truth that someday someone will banish us.”

Gill likens our terror to that of “infants trying to put off bedtime”. Vain and in vain, rolled into one. On a good day, we recognise our elders; on most days, we marginalise our elderly. Hence, we hide our panic with clinical terms like acuity (from the Latin root of sharpness) or the legal concept of capacity, defined by the NSW Department of Communities and Justice as “an adult’s ability to make a decision for themself”. Each term goes to distance the memento mori that is elderly, be that reminder residential or presidential.

I feel for Joe Biden. Aside from Trump, most of us do. Nobody wants to get that shoulder-tap to realise the twilight has gathered. J.M. Coetzee, the Nobel laureate, shared that unease in 2009 with Paul Auster, a fellow writer, across a series of letters collated in Here And Now (Faber & Faber, 2013): “I watch myself with a hawk’s eye for the first sign [of absentmindedness], as the end of my seventieth decade approaches.”

Auster replied with laughter, pointing out his friend’s slip-of-the-pen: “You say you are entering your seventieth decade on earth, which would mean you are 700 years old!” From juniors to seniors, we all stumble over our words and our feet, comforted to know the whole world isn’t watching.

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