Perception of elderliness – taboo and going around it

Abstract

Geographically distant societies do not always share the same cultural restrictions; similarly, next generations sometimes abandon old taboos, creating new ones at the same time. One can observe that a new taboo in modern Western societies is elderliness. In traditional societies, considered as a period of life in which experience gathered through the years gave an elderly person the privilege of being the leader of the group, the passer of knowledge and collective memory. Nowadays elderliness is losing this status, in the age of dynamic progress of education and new media (Balard, 2007). Moreover, with the process of eldering of societies, oldness is becoming more banal and is not a value per se, as it used to be before. On the contrary, the anthropological model dominating in the Western culture is valuating infinite youth and does not leave much place for elderliness and its problems, neither in public life, nor in social discourse. Basing on the textual corpus from years 2015–16, chosen from the Europresse base, our article analyses lexical and discursive tools used in press in order to go around contemporary taboos concerned with talking about elderliness and elderly people.