I suspect there are many words in all, or at least in most languages, to name humans who are considered old. I like the ‘Greis’ of German. (The Grimm dictionary suggests etymological links to the color grey, grau in German, gris in French, griseus in medieval Latin.) Greis as a noun, is much harsher than the obvious ‘die Alte’ or ‘der Alte.’ I think I may have encountered a ‘Greis‘ for the first time in Brecht’s Moritat von Mackie Messer. Mack the knife, suggests the song, is responsible for a fire that killed seven kids and a… Greis. Sieben Kinder und ein Greis. Two softer two-syllable words followed by three one-syllable ones, the last of them an accented diphthong: Greis. It stuck, though I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use the word in everyday conversation. I should call Ute or Helga or Monika and ask. And mention en passant that I now have a blog. “Ach, Caro, they will say, es ist ja wunderbar! Aber musst du uns unbedingt namentlich erwähnen? Könnten wir uns nicht vielleicht Undine, Hettie und Melisende heissen?” Ok, then. I shall soon call my friends Undine, Hettie and Melisende and ask them what kind of word they think Greis is.

I’m sure Spanish knows how to make old age sound harsh, too, with a single word, but my Spanish vocabulary, though in good working condition, is not terribly wide, and I can only think of ‘viejito, viejita’ right now. The gentle suffix conjures up ‘little old man, little old lady’, people who, at the push of a thumb, would always have an already unwrapped Lifesaver to offer. I’ll ask Margarita for a meaner way to name an old person in Peru. I shall also ask her if she’d like a nice pseudonym, too.

French has this homely suffix, -ard*, that easily provides its feminine by adding just an e: -arde. In Québec, we perceived its ugliness so distinctly that we have turned what the French call merde into marde. It sounds so much dirtier, no? (Actually, I have no idea why we say marde, whence it comes. All I know for sure: maudite marde! is a favorite expletive, used by all, young and old.) Back to -ard as a French suffix: it is harsh-sounding and most often pejorative. You can attach it to a verb, to a noun, to anything, really, thus immediately turning the thing, the action or the person in question into something a bit more contemptible. Someone interested in such things could have a look at, for instance, how and by whom the words dreyfusien or dreyfusiste were used in comparison to the word dreyfusard. In Proust, say. I won’t. But one could.

Which brings us to vieillard and vieillarde.

My sister, once, when she was about four years old, vehemently refused to spend a day at my maternal grandparents’ in their Saint-Urbain street apartment in Ahuntsic** because, as she said to their faces, ‘there are only vieillards here’. With ‘here’, she may also have meant the Nicolas-Viel Park, which was a sad place for us kids back then: maybe a working swing-set, a dirty sand pit, a dangerously out of control merry-go-round. It’s all very vague; that was a very long time ago. In any event, I remember being terribly embarrassed for my grandparents after my sister implied she considered them vieillards. Sure, they were ancient – probably seventy-two or three at the time- but one ought not have reminded them! And with such a harsh-sounding word! But I also remember all the adults laughing hysterically. That word, vieillard, in such a cute little girl’s mouth! It was the funniest thing! The anecdote was shared widely in the family. And remembered, by me, this morning, as I was reading about the artist Françoise Gilot, who continued to create and to paint well into her nineties -there is now a room at the Musée Picasso in Paris that will display her art; about Lore Segal, who still writes wonderfully witty fiction at 96; and about Hélène Cixous, born in 1937, whose published seminars I have been reading and enjoying so very much! I am fixin’ to prepare a list of such women -do Southerners still say that, fixin’ to, or just in the movies? It’s a theme that fills me with delight, that of women-writing-and-painting-and-just-thinking-and-living-and-mattering well into very old age.

Yeah. One day, maybe, I will write something about that, a text entitled ‘Mes vieillardes’. And I’ll dedicate it to my grand-mother Cécilia of Saint-Urbain street in Montreal, to her long life…

* -ard has a lot to say (or to say for itself) in English, of course. I’ll just write bastard and leave it at that.

** One does not think the word Ahuntsic is weird until one encounters it in writing. The A is silent. For more info -tho few solid facts- there’s Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahuntsic_(missionary)