by Robert Weisman
“Jill Tapper knew she’d made a mistake at the annual meeting of condo owners in Salisbury when she referred to their 55-plus complex as an ‘aging community.’ She may as well have invoked rocking chairs and shuffleboard.
“‘Some of the other members were furious,’ recalled Tapper, a longtime social worker. She quickly backed off and tried again. ‘Now I just call it the Windgate community.’
“Tapper had stumbled onto the third rail of life-stage nomenclature. Words once commonly used to describe older folks and their lives — ‘elderly,’ ‘geriatric,’ ‘in their golden years’ — are now scorned by some as patronizing.”
