6 / FEBRUARY 2022 PRIME
What’s in a Word? By Lois Stephens
I
t is amazing how the same word, with its simple meaning, can have totally different suggestions and implications to us as we age and continue onward in our lifetime journey. I’m thinking here of the word ‘senior’. This word of course means ‘higher in rank’, ‘holding a high or authoritative position’, ‘longer in service’, ‘more experienced’, and of course ‘older.’ We elders unfortunately recognize that in our individual cases, senior means older. But think about it for a moment. Remember being a senior in
high school? We were ecstatic to be called seniors. We were the top dogs; underclassmen looked up to us, we had special privileges and duties because we were seniors, and we had the world by the tail. We spent a lot of our senior year preparing and planning for a new life, new experiences, and new expectations as we completed that last year in high school. We figured we were the big shots and the hottest items ever to walk away clutching our graduating diplomas. We then moved on, aspiring to become senior management,
or senior accountants, or senior editors, perhaps senior advisors, or some position of prestige and authority that often had the word ‘senior’ attached to it. Well guess what, folks? We are now all seniors, even if it is only seniors in age. What the heck happened? How did we reach senior status so quickly? Suddenly the word ‘senior’ has lost its glow. I never strived to become a senior citizen, but it happened anyway, without any effort whatsoever on my part. Even though I have become a woman of a certain age, I find
it difficult to think of myself as a senior, but I definitely do not qualify as much else. Unfortunately, on the Senior Citizen’s Day that some stores offer, I don’t even have to politely point out to the checkout clerks that yes indeed, believe it or not, I DO qualify as a senior. They already know that just by taking a cursory glance at me. As a friend helpfully pointed out, as person is as old as she feels, in which case some days I am ninety-seven and other days I am a spry thirty-three.
