A person's dotage is the period of their lives when they are on the downward path into senility.
I can often be heard to claim that I dislike euphemisms. This is a lie, in part. What I dislike are bad euphemisms. Dotage, on the other hand, is a very good one. It refers to something that is sad at best and tragic at worst. It is a horrible thing to watch a vibrant mind decay. When you say that a person is in their dotage, though, it makes it sound like they're just old and silly and fun and enjoying themselves and their grandchildren, possibly playing in a greenhouse somewhere (oh, and they're British, for some reason). To say that someone is in their dotage makes it sound somehow like they're vaguely high all the time, rather than in the grips of a terrible disease. That, my friends, is a good euphemism.
Dotage is infrequently used in our times and probably had more use and traction during the late 19th century. It was used long before there was knowledge of senility. In fact, dotage has more of a positive definition than does senility, which infers a negative diagnosis. Dotage was probable cute because it was a characteristic of grandparents who still lived at home and who joined the family with dinner. Having a bit of memory lapse is part of life and we will continue to see more of it as life expectancies and general good health lengthens. There was a time when many humans lived to forty or fifty then died. That may still be the case in some populations now. But modern medical knowledge and treatments have allowed us to live longer lives and it is not at all uncommon in the US for people to live well into they 70s and 80s and beyond.
Posted by: J. D. | July 02, 2011 at 02:18 PM