Honey, I can hardly wait to move into the Skilled Nursing Facility.’ Can you imagine anyone saying that? We have to stop using the F Word (facility). Also, in aging services, shouldn’t we make it an assumption that the people we employ are skilled? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to move to a place where people aren’t skilled.The aging services profession is all about serving people, but lots of the language we use in our profession isn’t very people-centric.Language is a powerful shaper of the images we create in our mind. For example, people who wanted a new baseball stadium for the Minnesota Twins, stopped using the word ‘stadium’ and changed it to ‘ballpark.’ One word connotes a large, sterile facility amid an asphalt jungle. The other: blue skies, Cracker Jacks, apple pie and nostalgia.Baby boomers told us in our Age Wave Study that they can’t stand a number of the words that we use in the aging services lexicon. The Pioneer Network has an interesting look at language and a number of the words we use. Boomers told us they LOVE the word COMMUNITY. It sounds a lot different than ‘facility.’Givs Us Your Insights:What other words would you change? Let us know by clicking on ‘comments’ below. Posted By Eric Schubert, Director of Communications