Age-old fightin' words

A few weeks ago I had a medical test at a local diagnostic imaging center. I was trying to learn the cause of some pain that I suspected was related to exercise, either swimming - I'm training for a New England-wide competition - or cycling, since I'm getting ready for a bike ride across Quebec. The ultrasound was going smoothly enough until a doctor about 10 or 15 years younger than me walked in with my medical chart. She glanced at me, studied the monitor, and told me everything looked fine.

Then, in the kind of treacly voice usually reserved for small children and house pets, she asked: "And how many years young are you?"

I laughed lamely, getting a knot in my stomach of the sort that doesn't show up on ultrasounds but develops from time to time whenever I've been insulted or patronized. It's also the feeling I get when I'm livid but don't think fast enough to say what's on my mind, which in this case was: "Don't talk to me like I'm a child."

Or, more likely, an old person. Old people are condescended to all the time. In any case, I really took offense. For one thing, I'm more fit than I've ever been, and I'm hardly old unless you consider someone like Oprah to be old - we're the same age - and she seems to have a little bit of life left in her. I was still steaming about this a few days later when I picked up The New York Times and - vindication! Right on the front page was an article about "elderspeak," defined as that "sweetly belittling" form of address aimed at older people which manages to convey that they're incompetent. Chief among these offenses are: "How are we feeling?" "Who did you used to be?" and (I rest my case) "How many years young are you?"

To this I would add a couple of my own pet peeves: characterizing older people as "spry" or "spunky" and marveling that they're still "active" (as opposed to, what, a cadaver?).

I know that many older people suffer worse indignities than I did that day, including my own mother. I was with her once when she was at a supermarket she frequents because it gives her air mile points for every dollar she spends. As she was paying for her groceries, she asked the clerk how many points she'd accumulated, not realizing the information was available on the store's website. "Do you know anyone who has a computer?" he asked my mother, who at 86 has just upgraded her hardware and switched operating systems. "I do," she said politely, without - to my amazement - slugging him. (My mother is used to questions like this. People ask her all the time why she needs a computer.)

Maybe there was a time when turning 50 or 60 did signal the beginning of some kind of decline, back before exercise was such a big part of our culture and when retirees retreated into lonely solitude like the Jack Nicholson character in "About Schmidt." But even then I'm sure they were shocked at how abruptly they were dismissed as irrelevant.

What shocks me is how this is still happening - how when you pass 50 people think you've crossed into some strange and foreign realm populated only by the forgetful and the infirm. What about that 41-year-old Olympic swimmer or the 81-year-old New York marathon runner? How about Tina Turner, who's soulful and sexy at 68? Isn't this supposed to be the New Old Age?

"It is truly surprising that these stereotypes are so resistant," says Becca Levy, a Yale social psychologist who studies the impact of cultural stereotypes on older people. "I think people take in age stereotypes at a very early age, long before they are relevant, and there are a lot of cultural forces that reinforce them."

So let me do my bit to move things along. From the enlightened vantage point of being 50-something years old (got that?), I'd like to apologize to any elder whom, in the folly of youth, I offended, dismissed, or wrote off, simply by virtue of their age.

And as for Dr. 40-something, I have this to say: Meet me at the pool and I'll race you, anytime.

Linda Matchan can be reached at l_matchan@globe.com.