Picture a sign in a hospital corridor that reads OLD AGE, with an arrow pointing down the ward. Geriatric is that sign stuck onto something: onto a ward, a clinic, a nursing course, a research budget. Every serious use of the word is the sign doing its job. The joking uses are the sign being carried out of the hospital and stuck on other things — an ancient printer, a band still touring at seventy, and sometimes on a person, as a name. The hospital smell never comes off it, which is why it lands hard on people: it says you belong down that corridor now.