Current Attitudes to Ageing as Reflected in the Names of Australian Aged Care Facilities

Abstract

One of the most evolving areas of euphemisms in present-day society is ageing; our main hypothesis is that this process can be accurately studied through an analysis of the naming practices of aged care facilities. Accordingly, we examined the names of aged care facilities in the Melbourne region (Australia) from 2013 and compared this to the names used in 1987. We found that the 2013 sample showed a much greater degree of euphemistic usage as compared to the 1987 data. More specifically, the names in the 2013 data had a tendency to use the euphemistic strategy of full omission, and most often relied on conceptualizing the facility as either an upper-class family home or a holiday resort. Such strategies and conceptualizations were much less frequent in the 1987 data.

Keywords:

• aged care
• retirement facility
• ageing
• euphemism
• metaphor
• metonymy
• naming strategies

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Amanda Young for her help in the data collection. We are also grateful to Frank Nuessel and our anonymous reviewers for their insightful remarks. This research has been supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project no. DP 140102058 on “The cultural model of ageing in Australian English.”

Notes

1. By “aged care facilities” we mean permanent homes for the elderly.

2. In order to test the viability of the sample, we have created a second sample list as well, selecting every twentieth facility (and starting with the second facility on the master list to avoid having the same facilities as in the first random sample). We then analyzed the names of this second sample list as well, which depicted similar (though not identical) results as our first sample.

3. The term “successful ageing” entered gerontological terminology in 1987 (Rowe and Kahn, 1987) to denote the idea that an ever-increasing number of older people were leading an active and healthy lifestyle and were still contributing to society; the term has since become a mainstream expression.

4. Note that the names of these facilities often use proper nouns that have an upper-class “ring” to them: Cheltenham Manor, Trinity Manor, Darley House, Broughton Hall, etc.