| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 196
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| also refer to an office in certain churches or, more broadly, to a position of authority or respect conferred by age and experience: an elder in the Presbyterian Church, a tribal elder. The use of elder in the sense of “an elderly person” is uncommon in contemporary English, though it is widely used as an attributive in such phrases as elder care and elder services. | 1 |
elderly
| | Elderly applies to the stage of life that begins at the end of middle age. When used as a noun in referring to older persons in general, it is relatively neutral, denoting a group of people whose common characteristic is advanced age: policy issues of special interest to the elderly. However, when used as an adjective in describing a particular person, elderly has a range of connotation that goes beyond the denotation of chronological age to include the various effects of aging. On the one hand, it can suggest dignity; on the other, frailty or diminished capacity. While there is no reason to avoid elderly as an adjective, you should keep in mind that a phrase such as the elderly couple in the second row is likely to conjure a more specific—and probably older—image than if the couple were described as older. | 2 |
ethnicity / ethnic
| | Who is more ethnic—a WASP or a Jew? A Russian or a Mexican? A Catholic or a Buddhist? The English word ethnic can be traced ultimately to the Greek word for “people” in the sense of “foreign nation.” (“People” meaning “the general populace” was expressed in Greek by demos.) Thus the idea of otherness, as measured by such attributes as nationality, religion, language, or race, is central to ethnicity. But the question is, other than what? When the adjective ethnic is applied to such cultural items as food and dress, the presumption is generally of a difference from a surrounding norm; Thai food is considered ethnic fare in the United States but not in Bangkok. When it comes to people, the same assumption of departure from a presumed norm is sometimes made, as in this passage from Newsweek magazine describing the Greek-American presidential candidate Michael Dukakis: “For a lot of people, the governor of Massachusetts was too liberal, too ethnic, too cold—maybe even too short.” However, the concept of ethnicity as it relates to a society as a whole is today generally considered to include all groups, each of which is equally “other” in relation to the rest. That is, we generally consider our own group—WASP, Jew, Russian, or whatever—to be just as ethnic as anyone else’s, and we respond to questions about our ethnicity as readily when we belong to the majority population as when we belong to the minority. | 3 |
Eurasian
| | In its ethnic as opposed to its geographic sense, Eurasian denotes a person of mixed European and Asian parentage. It was first used in the 19th century in referring to someone of European—especially British—and East Indian birth; in a contemporary American context the parents are more often a white American—that is, of European descent—and a person of East or South Asian origin. | 4 |
| The geographic sense of Eurasian is quite distinct, referring to the land | 5 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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