Words That Become Law

Words That Become Law

The scientific community spent the weeks before July 13 mobilizing against a proposed White House rule that would give political appointees final authority over federal research grants. The rule, issued by the Office of Management and Budget on May 29, would allow grants to be terminated at any time if a political appointee determines they are no longer aligned with current federal priorities. Aging research — on cognitive decline, elder abuse, guardianship, social isolation, and the conditions that support or undermine older adults’ autonomy — is precisely the kind of research that political appointees with different priorities might decide to terminate. The scientific community was right to object.

But the OMB rule surfaces a vulnerability the aging field has not yet fully named: the research that survives political pressure still has to travel through language before it becomes policy. And the language of aging policy in the United States — in legislation, in agency guidance, in congressional testimony, in press releases and public statements — has never been held to the same standard of rigor, accuracy, and dignity that the science itself demands.

This is the gap no existing guide has closed.

Significant progress has been made in adjacent registers. The American Geriatrics Society adopted modified American Medical Association style guidance in 2017, reinforcing that words like the elderly, seniors, and the aged should not be used in clinical and research communication. The American Psychological Association, the Associated Press, and the Gerontological Society of America’s own Reframing Aging Initiative have each developed age-inclusive language guidance for their respective audiences — researchers, journalists, clinicians, and communicators. Research by Busso, Volmert, and Kendall-Taylor, published in the Journals of Gerontology, has demonstrated that reframing messages about aging can measurably reduce implicit age bias. The field knows what better language looks like. It has built the tools to produce it in academic publishing and journalism.

What it has not built is a comparable framework for the register where language most consequentially shapes outcomes: the bill text that defines who receives protection and on what terms; the legislative findings that encode the assumptions behind a statute; the agency guidance that tells clinicians, social workers, and courts how to interpret and apply the law; the congressional testimony that shapes what legislators understand about the people they are legislating for.

A recent congressional statement on loneliness and social connection illustrated the gap precisely. The statement appropriately referred to people with disabilities — person-first language, consistent with decades of disability rights advocacy that has made careful language routine in legislation and public communications. The same statement used the elderly. The contrast was not a failure of intention. It was a failure of infrastructure. The disability rights movement built a language architecture — a disciplined set of terms, definitions, and sentence structures — and made it the default in policy drafting. Aging has not.

The need is most acute in elder justice law, where language does its heaviest and least examined work. Ward versus person subject to guardianship. Incapacitated person versus person with a cognitive disability. Protecting vulnerable seniors in a bill’s purpose clause versus advancing the rights, safety, autonomy, and dignity of older adults. These are not stylistic preferences. They encode fundamentally different legal relationships — between the state and the citizen, between protection and rights, between substitution and support. A probate court applying ageist assumptions embedded in statute is not departing from the law. It is following it. The language is where ageism enters the system — quietly, syntactically, in the places no one thinks to examine.

What the aging field needs is a language guide for public policy: a practical, evidence-informed framework for how policymakers, legislative staff, agency officials, advocates, journalists, and public communicators write about older adults in the places where language becomes law, funding, regulation, and public meaning. Not a list of words to avoid. A disciplined set of terms, definitions, sentence structures, and before-and-after examples that make better language easier to use than worse language.

The Gerontological Society of America and its National Center to Reframe Aging are uniquely positioned to lead this work. The FrameWorks Institute has built the communications infrastructure to support it. The Elder Justice Coalition has the congressional and advocacy relationships to distribute it. The scholarship already exists — much of it published in GSA's own The Gerontologist.

What exists is the foundation. What is missing is the guide. What is at stake is whether the science the field has spent decades building reaches policymakers in language worthy of it — or arrives, as it too often does now, wearing assumptions the science has already refuted.

Note

Office of Management and Budget. (2026, May 29). Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance [Proposed rule]. Federal Register. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/29/2026-10817/regulation-for-federal-financial-assistance

Selected Scholarship

Bowman, C., & Lim, W. M. (2021). How to avoid ageist language in aging research? An overview and guidelines. Activities, Adaptation & Aging, 45(4), 269–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/01924788.2021.1992712 

Butler, R. N. (1969). Age-ism: Another form of bigotry. The Gerontologist, 9(4, Part 1), 243–246. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/9.4_Part_1.243     

Busso, D. S., Volmert, A., & Kendall-Taylor, N. (2019). Reframing aging: Effect of a short-term framing intervention on implicit measures of age bias. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 74(4), 559–564. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gby080

Gendron, T. L., Welleford, E. A., Inker, J., & White, J. T. (2016). The language of ageism: Why we need to use words carefully. The Gerontologist, 56(6), 997-1006. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnv066  

Levy, B. R. (2009). Stereotype embodiment: A psychosocial approach to aging. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(6), 332–336. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01662.x 

Murphy, E., Fallon, A., Dukelow, T., & O’Neill, D. (2022). Don’t call me elderly: A review of medical journals’ use of ageist literature. European Geriatric Medicine, 13(4), 1007–1009. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41999-022-00650-4 

Ng, R., & Indran, N. (2022). Role-based framing of older adults linked to decreased ageism over 210 years: Evidence from a 600-million-word historical corpus. The Gerontologist, 62(4), 589–597. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnab108   

Trucil, D. E., Lundebjerg, N. E., & Busso, D. S. (2021). When it comes to older adults, language matters and is changing: American Geriatrics Society update on reframing aging style changes. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 69(1), 265–267. https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.16848 

Williams, K., Kemper, S., & Hummert, M. L. (2003). Improving nursing home communication: An intervention to reduce elderspeak. The Gerontologist, 43(2), 242–247. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/43.2.242 

Existing Style Guidance: Selected Resources

AMA Manual of Style Committee. (2020). AMA manual of style: A guide for authors and editors (11th ed.), Chapter 11: Correct and preferred usage. Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/amamanualofstyle/book/27941

American Psychological Association. (2019). Bias-free language: Age. APA Publication Manual, Section 5.3. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/age

Associated Press. (2020). AP Stylebook guidance on age and older adults. https://www.apstylebook.com 

Gerontological Society of America, Reframing Aging Initiative. (2022). Revised style guides advance age-inclusive language. GSA CEO Blog. https://www.geron.org/News-Events/GSA-News/CEO-Blog/revised-style-guides-advance-age-inclusive-language  

Lundebjerg, N. E., Trucil, D. E., Hammond, E. C., & Applegate, W. B. (2017). When it comes to older adults, language matters: Journal of the American Geriatrics Society adopts modified American Medical Association style. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 65(7), 1386–1388. https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.14941