Do you find terms of endearment such as ‘love’ and ‘darling’ patronising?
A care home in Yorkshire has been marked down by inspectors as potentially uncaring because staff address elderly residents with terms such as “love” and “darling”.
The health watchdog the Care Quality Commission (CQC) said the tendency of carers at Brackenley residential home in Harrogate to use the affectionate terms, which are particularly common in Yorkshire, could be construed as “demeaning and patronising”.
Management expressed surprise and insisted they would not ban the practice because they believe residents prefer it.
One expert on Yorkshire dialect condemned the CQC’s decision as the latest example of a linguistic “tyranny” attempting to suppress a long-standing and distinctive way of speaking out of a misguided idea that people would be upset.
The CQC said that “Although the language was meant to be friendly it could be regarded as demeaning and patronising.”
Dr Barrie M Rhodes, a linguist and member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, said: “The use of the word love is part of our heritage – God knows how many centuries it has been going on but a very long time.”
