Playing with a New Word for Aging

I got to this age the way everyone else does - by hanging around on this planet for X amount of time. What do we call being over 65? I read a couple of comments today without active participation until I decided to make up my own word for an older person. Making up words is more fun than aging. A word's power gets muddied in perception. Evidence crone which has slumped in popular usage over the centuries. Elder, some object to as too Druish. Senior? OK if there's a golf league to join or a discount to be had. Old. Nobody cares much for that because. Flowchart. That person with the wheelchair? Not me yet. If we think of this process of hanging around on earth for X time, (or for the math fans Earth+Time=Old. Maybe X=ET?) as spiritual growth or wisdom plus physical decline that gives me a place to word search. Wax and wane don't quite do the job because the etymology of those words is too close to make a word that's interesting or simple. Wax can mean grow in intensity, whether light in the case of the moon; or power in the case of potential energy (like a wound watch spring). That gives us aug. Augere in Latin, or Olde English, although that leads to augment and that leads to ED junk and I'm not going there. Wane gives us Latin vanus (empty) although I don't believe that etymological root. Ah, Yahoo, so not a root but a word itself. Combine spiritual growth and bodily decline. We're already in the realm of philosophical. Philosophy is not an antidote to science. Started reading a book by a philosopher which I then stopped reading because philosophy + science gets into the realm of gobbledygook. Holding two opposite thoughts in your head at the same time=bonkers. And getting a PhD in philosophy seems redundant to me. So trying to combine spiritual growth, which is potential energy (philosophy), but not applicable to every human's bodily decay over time, which is science and inescapable for everyone born of woman. That doesn't feel as much like bonkers. While the words are fun and highly entertaining for those of us old people who are terribly fond of words, old is old. No judgment on whether there is spiritual growth attained, or wisdom cultivated (and then, even more difficult: prove applied.) Judgment vs. discernment. Adding one more thought into this cauldron. So I'll stop here and go do something simple like laundry. Haven't even touched on the gobbledygookiery of adding anti-aging culture into the hopper. On to laundry...although...Latin de (to turn aside) as in decline, combined with a Latin word for growth silva is cool. Desilva. Turn aside from green? Maybe silva on its own. I am old. I am silva. [Photo: Detroit Bold is excellent coffee.]

Virago

Getting acquainted with Jon Meacham's biography of Thomas Jefferson, I admired the weight and the paper. Hefty and fragrant. Started with Notes on the Text, at which point Meacham writes that he tidied up Jefferson's correspondence for our reading. All the it's were replaced with the proper its, etc. In the introduction Meacham then didn't bother with primping a Jefferson household slave's description of his master. I needed to calm down. Pictures are good. No pictures of Jefferson's wife. Turns out there are no portraits of Martha existing. 10 years married, and 6 children later, she was dead. Jefferson is highly reported as mourning his diminutive and ill wife's death, but what did he do about keeping her healthy while she lived? Aargh. A plate of Elizabeth Merry, wife of British minister Anthony Merry has Jefferson describing her as a "virago," and references a social skirmish over protocol. Meacham's book is subtitled The Art of Power. What more do I need to know about power? That it is male, hierarchical, dominant and a pain in my ass for a lifetime. Words can soothe me, so I looked up virago. Once upon a time, it meant a heroic woman. And then the Latin Bible scholars got hold of it. Aeflic, and St. Jerome, followed by Merriam-Webster, the Oxford Dictionary and its online ilk. Wikipedia gives a more thorough etymology. Jefferson used the repulsive and first promulgated modern [14th c.] definition for virago:  a shrew, a loud and overbearing woman, and (adding insult to other cultures) a termagant. Over a dinner party? I don't want to read this book. I don't remember why I got it from the library. I just finished reading about Generals Grant and Sherman, and I'm male ego-ed out. I hope I'm done this lifetime with reading about gentile slaveholders in glowy prose. I'd rather perhaps read something at all about Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, who inherited her father's 100 slaves at his death, but didn't really own them because all property went to those wielding The Art of Power.