I was at the BlogHer conference in New York when one of the panelists commented that “even” her own mother blogs. She called her mother “one of those elder bloggers.” Meaning, she said, “anyone over 50 who blogs.”

I pried my gnarled fingers off my Underwood, slammed down my Ensure and quaked, “Say, what, girlie?” That’s a joke. I would never say anything so ageist, but I did gulp and turned to my daughter to ask, “Might she be talking about moi?”

I am well over 50 and my daughter is well under and yet, blogging wise, she is the senior one. Someone might call her a hottie blogger. She probably wouldn’t object.

But elder blogger really pushed my buttons. Is Maya Angelou an elder poet? Is Annie Leibovitz an elder photographer. Is Madonna an elder rock star?

Not surprisingly, the blogging world is dominated by youngish people. A story in the New York Times said that 53 percent of bloggers are between the ages of 21 to 35. Only about 7 percent of bloggers are over 51. In the world of blogging the young are old hands, the old are newbies.

At the BlogHer conference there were more than 2,400 women bloggers and certainly the under-50 demo outnumbered the over-50. And over 60, like me.

It could be worse, I guess. They might have called us “geezer geeks.”

I asked Beth Blakely from the website Vibrant Nation, which is for women age 50 and over and has a number of regular bloggers ,what she thinks of the term. Beth says it can be helpful to identify a blogger by her subject just as you would any writer with a particular focus. But the general tag of elder blogger doesn’t work for her.

My friend and contemporary Michele blogs about food and wine and some might call her a foodie blogger. But elder blogger? Never. She colors her hair egglplant and hula dances. I can’t imagine she will ever be an elder anything.

The problem is the word. In some cultures “elder” is a sign of respect, as it was once in our own and might some day be again. But in our mainstream youth-happy world it creaks.

I will embrace my gray hair, my funky sore back and that I know most Beatles lyrics. But elder is a description I am not ready or brave enough to own. It makes me feel old. Blogging makes me feel like a player.

Pattie Heiser has the website 50 Fabulous and doesn’t consider herself an elder blogger. “It gives me hives to think of it.” She has the same problem with the word. “Our culture does not revere our elderly and to be so means that you will be disregarded and discarded.”

On the other side, Joan Price is fine with elder. Joan writes books about sex after 60 and blogs about it at NakedAtOurAge.com In her mid-60s, Joan calls herself a senior and considers her audience boomers, seniors and, yes, elders. She credits her late husband with putting the right spin on elder, as someone who had “the wisdom of a lifetime of experiences.”

Were elder to deliver such a strong, respectful vibe it would be something to aspire to. It would be a designation that you earned, not something automatically granted when you become a certain age, like Medicare and movie discounts.

Then, if someone called me an elder, meaning that I was experienced, wise and worldly, I would flaunt it like a new Pashmina.

But elder as in elder blogger? No, in the blogging world I’m pretty much a juvenile.

With all the concern paid to the endangered written word – who’s producing it, who’s reading it and how will newspapers and books survive – we might want to pay more attention to preserving the spoken word.

That is, the talking part, when we’re face to face. Where chatter is not reduced to 140 characters on a tiny keyboard. And we can strive for eloquence, understanding and maybe throw in a few adjectives and adverbs.

When we’re talking, we don’t need any stinking tweets or text. We can use our big girl and big boy words. While old and new media duke it out, we could be having summer salons and front porch idea fests. Return to those days of communicating in full sentences.

And yet, I worry, having observed a sloppiness among people, even those who consider themselves articulate and well-spoken, to slip into “blah, blah, blah” speech. The alarming part is that it’s catching. Someone blah-blahs you and you blah-blah back.

For example, a friend reports she is no longer going out with a man who is smart, kind and likes to dance. “So, he called to say he couldn’t come to my birthday party, and blah, blah, blah. And you know, I can’t put up with that anymore.”

But what is the blah, blah? Maybe there’s a pattern of behavior with this person that I’m supposed to know and doesn’t need explaining, but how can she assume? She could be leaving out the best part of the story. Did she mean, instead of “blah, blah, blah,” to say, “Because orphans, as you know, hate birthday parties.” Or, “because he’s back with his ex.”

“Blah, blah, blah” seems to have replaced “yada, yada, yada.” You remember “yada, yada, yada.” It was immortalized in a Seinfeld show in which George complains that his girlfriend stops short of saying what she really means and glosses it over with “yada, yada, yada.” And Jerry Seinfeld says perhaps she is just being succinct in the manner of USA Today.

Of course, that was at a time when USA Today was considered shorthand journalism but which is “War and Peace” compared to blog briefings. Online communication is terse and code-like. Twitter seems like passing a note in junior high and having the teacher read it in front of everyone.

But offline we can talk on into the night.

Social media is not the same as social discourse which is full and rich in a “My Dinner with Andre” kind of way.

Maybe people use “blah, blah” because they’re feeling time-sensitive and rushing to tell the story. Like saying “and so on” or “same old, same old” or “etcetera, etcetera,” assuming that the other person can fill in the details. But it takes no more time to use real words.

Besides when someone says, “Blah, blah” I think of what the dog hears when you look into his face and say, “I mean it, no more barking.”

Consider how many delicious and useful words are rejected every minute just to fit a tweet or a blog or a Blackberry that we could save and use in our next conversation. When the napkins are balled up and the glasses pushed back and talk drifts down the table like music, punctuated by laughter and maybe debate and then everyone is taking turns recalling childhood memories of swimming in their favorite green lake.

And it’s all brilliant, not blah-blah, these words that are attached to thoughts, not thumbs.