Dragon Food2

Whenever I spoken to the people who were involved in the elder care in Sri Lanka, I have always heard the words such as "inmates", "sick room", "institution", or "sick people" from their mouths. In the beginning, I tried to repeat their sentences with using different terminologies to implicitly correct the offensive language. However, I quickly realized that my approach was not effective at all. Although it was a bit sensitive thing to challenge the language use in different cultural context, I decided to express my feeling about the power of language to the people who were using those offensive words.

As you can imagine, I was criticized by my action being "too picky" about the language. I was told that "we use inmates, but it does not mean we treat them without respect. This is the common term that we use in the institution." I was also told that "when we call each individual, we call them aunt or uncle. We treat them with respect."

When I asked some staff members that "how do you call prisoners in prison?" They said "inmates". Then, I said "don't you think that it is a bit strange to use the same terminology for elders in a care home and prisoners in prison?" Most of them seemed to understand my point at that moment. However, I found them calling "our 10 inmates...." to describe elders in five minutes later.

The battle of "changing language" will be quite a challenging one, because most of the people do not even realize how offensive some words sound. Because language controls our perception and behaviors in unconscious level, we should carefully monitor the ways in which we choose our language in our society.

We should not allow us to feed institutional mindset with offensive language...