The old old question in writing and public speaking is: who is old? My mother always said that old was your own age plus 15. That works reasonably well until you pass the 80-year marker (as my mother has) and you have to admit that may you don’t need to tack on that decade-and-a-half to be called old.

In medical writing, old people are generally called geriatric patients and the current convention is to see them as people at or over 65.

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) sends out membership cards (and solicits donations) to people over the age of 55, a cutoff point often recognized by retail establishments and restaurants as the youngest age at which senior discounts are awarded.

So what happens if you have to write about gerontological issues? You may do the euphemism two-step and simply avoid the word "old" in favor of things like "geriatric," "senior" or even "elderly." All of those words seem to sound milder and less jarring than old.

You may not know this, but English is an amalgam of Germanic and Latin words. English can rightly claim to be the most Germanic Latin language (or the most Latin Germanic language). In many cases, we have redundancy built into the language in that we have at least one Germanic and one Latin word for the same thing. And, in general, the Germanic word is harsher, more abrupt (and more commonly used) while the Latin word tends to be more cerebral, more sophisticated, and generally more elegant.

Let’s start with an easy example. Sweat. The Germanic word for this phenomenon is sweat, but the Latin term is perspiration. When people make out their last wishes, they do so in a Last Will (Germanic) and Testament (Latin). If your life ends, you die (German) or become deceased (Latin). Most of the really strong swear words in English are Germanic in origin. In fact, although English contains far more Latin-based words than Germanic words, the average American’s most commonly used words are by far the Germanic ones.

Which brings us back to the people getting on in years. Old is a Germanic word; elderly or senior or geriatric are Latin words. Medicine tends to favor the Latin anyway, so the fact that an old-person’s doctor is called a gerontologist is just the way doctors see the world.

So how do you talk about old people if your writing requires it? First, you have to recognize that many people might be offended by any delineation between old and young that they disagree with. Realizing this, you next have to decide how much you care about it. You may not care at all. Good for you.

Then you have to choose your words carefully, recognizing that words describing old people are emotionally packed. Old is a harsh word, but it’s accurate. So use it if you want to emphasize that maybe we are all getting a little too sensitive about this age thing. There’s nothing wrong with being young, so why should there be something wrong with being old?

On the other hand, if you’re writing for a consumer magazine, you may want to tiptoe around the whole issue and talk about "older" (which, as a relative term, does not seem as jarring as just plain "old") people. Senior citizens, people in their golden years, retired people are all good euphemisms. There was a time when people called old women "ladies of a certain age." (Anyone else ever notice the acronym for that is loca?)

Some writers weasel around the age thing by referring to people as "the boomers" or "the aging boomers," referring to a generation. Aging as part of a collective wave of humanity seems less offensive, I guess. A person may not mind being called a "boomer" but does not want to be called "old."

Be careful as you write about old people. First of all, I am one, or nearly one. And second of all, your choice of words is going to convey a bit of your attitude. Are you trying to mask the notion of aging (which means you probably secretly thing aging is not a good thing)? Are you trying to make age sound irrelevant? Are you trying to avoid the word "old"–which means you must think there is something wrong with it?

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This woman is a typochondriac.

You know the symptoms. This is the kind of person who sees a typo and goes into anaphylaxis, requiring both a team of paramedics and the National Guard to resuscitate her to a recuperative state. There she lies for months as teams of therapists help her cope with the fragments of her shattered life. She has seen a typo. Years later, she will have post-traumatic stress disorder and need help opening books and newspapers, so deeply ingrained is the fear that she may perhaps, yet again, see a misspelled word or an errant comma.

Typochondriacs typically have no sense of proportion. To them, seeing a typo is like being bitten in the throat by a water moccasin. It does not matter what the context is. The typo can be one word in an index of a ten-thousand page manual or it can be a misplaced punctuation mark in an email.

They see a typo and nearly die. However, few of them actually do. Most recover to the point that they rail and rally and whine and thunder against all typos, great and small.

If this is you, please. Get over yourself. People misspeak all of the time. Have you ever seen people park their cars? Why is it that we can give some grace and leniency for the minor errors that occur in a busy life but this does not extend to writers. I write more than most typochondriacs talk, but I don’t jump down their throats if they ever say "um" or have an incomplete sentence.

With the escalation in texting, typochondriacs are probably going into hiding.

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Writing, particularly online writing, is one of many enterprises not particularly troubled by etiquette. While I don’t wish to supplant Miss Manners here, I think that our global undervaluing of etiquette leads to a great deal of confusion.

The purpose of etiquette has been expressed as never insulting another individual accidentally. That’s terribly profound, in the wry way that etiquette masters are profound, because what it really means is that with etiquette, when you insult people, they’ll know you meant it.

Etiquette in writing is not the same as political correctness, which is just another way of beating all of the life out of everything you communicate. A writer can be good at writing and incredibly incorrect politically. I’m not sure you can do it in reverse, that is, be excruciatingly correct politically and write well. You may get the grammar all right, but people who are too politically correct simply can’t say anything. So we’re not talking political correctness here, we’re talking about etiquette. Not only are they different animals, they’re different animals who hate each other and snap at each other when they get the chance.

Here are my 7 rules for etiquette for writers.

1. Stop swearing. I know that four-letter words are increasingly common on TV, they’re all over the Internet, and you hear them from the mouths of babes. However, you are a writer. If you want to offend somebody, then you should get good enough at being offensive, objectionable, and insulting that you do not need swear words, which are for amateurs. A real writer should be working from the polysyllabic end of the dictionary, not the words more familiar to the "writers" of graffiti.

2. Do not rage at the typos of others. Every ridiculous diatribe discussion I see on the Internet about the decline of writing is usually written by writers who make grammatical and spelling mistakes in their own missives. If you are sickened, nauseated, offended, and angered by the typos of others, I think that you may be a typo-machine yourself. So buy yourself a manual of style and practice on those lists of commonly misspelled words and forget slamming people who make mistakes. I’d much rather read an insightful, thoughtful, and well crafted article by a writer who occasionally uses some double spaces and misspells a word here or there than read some lunatic ranting that nobody can spell anymur.

(By the way, Babe Ruth, a former "home run king" in baseball, held simultaneous records for most home runs and most strikeouts. Why? He wasn’t schizophrenic, it’s just that he was so good at hitting home runs that he was put up to bat frequently and anybody who gets to bat frequently enough is going to have his fair share of strikeouts. It’s the same with writing. The more you write, the better you’ll get at it, but the higher your error rate.)

3. Take advantage of the small courtesies. It is not a sign of political weakness to use terms like "please" or "thank you" or "I appreciate your help" when corresponding with others. When writing articles, these noble sentiments can be expressed indirectly  by writing things that interest people and giving them a payoff for their spending time with you. In other words, write stuff that has value, is clear, has been well thought out, and does not seem too terribly self-serving.

4. If you have to annoy people, do not do it through typography. There is a common convention in emails that states that all capital letters is the equivalent of shouting. All capital letters can make anything hard to read, too. So can too-small fonts, silly fonts, or fonts that do not contrast sufficiently with the background. For instance, if you’re writing an online text on a white background, black is going to give you great contrast. So will a navy blue or dark grey. Light grey, not so much. Right now there is a trend among packagers of cosmetic products to use light type on a similar but only marginally darker background in very tiny (4 or 5 point) type. If you have something to say, give a reader a fighting chance at being able to see it.

5. Resist the short police.  Right now, there are people who constantly scream that everything written should be shorter, briefer, more succinct. The "Twitter" rage is about capturing your innermost thoughts in 140 characters or fewer. While brevity may indeed be the soul of wit, some things require more lengthy discussion. Some people actually want to read book-length manuscripts about history or art or business and not just inane tweets. There really is no way to write a manual about considerations for physicians in prescribing narcotic medications in 25 words. You can’t write the history of American art in two 500-word articles. Be free and let your writing’s content and intention dictate its length. Most people on the short police hate to read and should really not be evaluating written works anyway.

6. Empathize. Write from the point of view of your reader. If you are writing about pacemakers for people who just found out they need one, do not explain that the venous incision during implant will likely be subclavian rather than jugular, although jugular vein incisions are sometimes required. That text is true, by the way, but it contains just enough words an ordinary person will understand (cut-the-jugular-vein) to panic him without giving him any useful information. Good writers never dumb-down their texts but they do write with an awareness of what their readers are most likely to know and understand. If that is below the writer’s own level of expertise, the writer adjusts. That’s the key: you, as the writer, adjust rather than demanding that your audience adjust to you.

7. Use your gift.  One obligation writers have is to write well, but to that I would add: write often. Writers ought to be writing letters to the editors, blog comments, setting up their own websites and blogs; writers ought to be crafting novels and screenplays; we ought to be sending out queries to leading magazines and trying to get our own newspaper columns. And once you have your soap box, you need to use it responsibly and use it for good and not evil. The world is full of lawyers and lawyerly types who say things like "this may work" or "this could happen" or "it may be that…" We need some writers who have the guts to say, "This is wrong" or "This is right." Take a stand and make your viewpoint clear. That’s why you have the gift of writing!

Etiquette means that you only offend people when you mean it and, if you’re a good writer, in a way that they will know. And, as writers, it is our duty and responsibility to write well, often, and clearly about the things that we know and care about. As we practice our writing to get increasingly more skillful and on-target, we should be using our talents and energy to express our viewpoints. Most writers are good thinkers; writing well and thinking logically go hand-in-hand.

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