Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

minder of Doris’ poor health or her rather lonely life. It is, needless to say, irrelevant whether
Doris really feels lonely or physically weak. All that matters is JC’s adapting her speech to
her perception of Doris’ life position and experiences. JC finds it impossible to ask seemingly
innocent questions such as ‘what’ve you been up to?’ or ‘doing anything nice this weekend?’,
knowing (or believing) that Doris’ circumstances does not allow her to do anything reportable,
and that she is not planning to do any either.
The other elderly woman, Emily, on the other hand, leads an active life, and JC can the-
refore unobtrusively ask such questions. In addition, JC has no problem interrupting Emily
telling a repeated anecdote or ‘openly signalling any negative response’ (ibid: 19). With Doris,
on the other hand, she does not interrupt or signal negative responses, she does on the other
hand participate in ‘ideological matching’ i.e. indulging the elder’s opinions. These strategies
could be seen as face-saving or politeness strategies, but their negative potential in stigmati-
sing the elderly are obvious.
Furthermore, over-accommodative strategies have a tendency of reproducing themselves.
When JC finds it impossible to ask Doris certain otherwise trivial questions, she effectively
denies Doris the possibility to assume ordinaryness. That is, due to the simplest mechanics of
conversation - an utterance must show sensitivity to the context it appears in - Doris’ possibi-
lity for self presentation are limited by JC question. Naturally, JC’s interactional possibilities
are limited by Doris’ moves as much as vice versa. The fundamental difference is not in the
process of identity construction, but in what is at stake for the two. An elderly person as Doris
could ultimately be labelled as weak and dependant on the help of others – in the extreme ca-
se dependant on professional help of others. For a younger person as JC, a similar social stig-
matisation is not at stake, if anything she would be labelled as caring – at the most as over-
caring.
What this adds up to is that ‘agedness’ in the sense of negative stereotypes of communi-
cation is a joint construction between interlocutors. Doris may very well be communicatively
less capable than Emily, but only through the interaction with JC, are the potentials of the two
elderly women analysable. Not only conversations are at stake, since “certain kinds of speech
from the elderly (as well as the younger’s own self-monitored speech in that same context) do
seem to have a range of cognitive and affective consequences, including reinforcing ageist
stereotypes, including feelings of a lack of interactional control and guilt, and lessening the
desire for contacts with the elderly in the future.” (ibid: 35)
Coupland et al. themselves open up the possibility that the features presented above are
not restricted to intergenerational talk. “Indeed, it is quite possible that many of the features of
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