Is it offensive to call someone ‘middle-aged’?

A new victimhood group has just dropped: middle-aged people. Yes, according to language guides published by Bristol and York St John universities, it isn’t just ‘BAME’ or ‘BIPOC’ or ‘LGBTQIA+’ folk who must be protected from words that are too old-fashioned or insufficiently ungainly to be uttered in public. Apparently, those on the downward slope to 50 desperately need this kind of obsessive, paternalistic speech-policing, too.

According to these style guides, unearthed by the Sun, ‘middle-aged’ is basically the n-word for men greying around the temples and decked out in Superdry. ‘Language is a powerful tool. It can empower and be a force for change, but it can also offend, marginalise, trivialise, and perpetuate harmful attitudes and stereotypes’, proclaims York St John, before sternly instructing readers to say ‘Gareth is 49’ rather than ‘Gareth is middle-aged’. Apparently, OAP is out-of-order, too. ‘People of pensionable age’ is much better, says the guide. (Personally, I prefer the more elegant People of Age.)

Not to be outdone, Bristol’s guide suggests we should also ‘avoid using euphemisms or patronising language to describe older people’, including ‘silver surfer’ or ‘of a certain age’. In fact, we should forgo generational labels entirely, because ‘Generation X’, ‘Baby Boomers’, ‘Millennials’, etc, ‘can reinforce negative stereotypes’ – presumably about those snowflake Millennials, rich, racist Boomers and insufferably cynical Gen Xers.

To be clear, these guides are for the universities’ own communications, not full-blown speech codes for all the ageist bastards who study and work there to abide by. But this obviously goes beyond setting a simple house style. Whatever time-rich souls tapped these out genuinely seem to think that the only thing that stands between us and a truly harmonious world is an administrator prepared to chide people for saying ‘Youngsters’.

Plus, universities have plenty of policies that outline how staff and students should speak, too. At Bristol, lecturers were recently encouraged to use the phrase ‘catgender’ when describing someone with an ‘extremely strong connection to cats or other felines’. Apparently, these freaks use ‘nya / nyan’ pronouns, which is ‘meow’ in Japanese. Oh how I wish I was making this up.

I know what some of you are thinking. Why care about the crazy missives crafted by woke pencil-pushers on campus or in the corporate world? Well, for one thing, it’s a reliable source of amusement. (The other week we learned the British Red Cross is telling its staff to swap ‘illegal migrant’ for ‘person experiencing migration’.) The linguistic monomania, the absurdly long phrases, the fact no one will ever talk like this, is objectively funny.

But it’s also a stark reminder of the kinds of minds that now run big institutions – and the absurd preoccupation with speech and words they all seem to possess. We live in an age in which some of the most educated and influential among us are gripped by the delusion that politics is downstream from the dictionary – that if you purge this or that phrase then we’ll stagger, blinking into utopia. This is why they’re all obsessed with censorship and foisting their self-parodying rules on the rest of us.

Never stop laughing at them. And never let them tell you who you can and can’t call old.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater