7 ms·

Why is everyone suddenly calling homeless, houseless? It's homeless people, not houseless. If there is some bizarre attempt to reframe things, fine, but what

• culi 4y ago
  idk who "everyone" is. Maybe you came across another comment of mine where I also used the term houseless I use it because of a conversation I had with someone who is houseless. She didn't like being called "homeless" because the city she was sleeping in WAS her "home". She grew up there. Her parents grew up there. She went to school, knew the community there, etc. Eventually due to gentrification she couldn't afford to live in a house anymore. When the term "homeless" is used I think it often has the effect of painting those who are labelled it as not part of the community. Indeed an off-duty cop later harassed us after the talk w her and some other houseless folk and told me "we don't want them in our community". The cop had an out-of-state license plate... Whether it's a house or an apartment, the point imo is to draw attention to how our definitions of who does and doesn't have the right to claim membership of a community has been degraded to purely material means. This person who's not even from this state gets to say he doesn't want HER in "our community"
  • b112 4y ago
    Changing terms is meaningless, as any stigma assigned to the prior term immediately exists for the new term. And that unfortunate woman does indeed have no home, even if she is living in her old home town. Home has more than one meaning. This is just virtue signaling.
    • hutzlibu 4y ago
      I would disagree that it is meaningless, as words have meaning and make it into thoughts. But sure, just renaming something doesn't magically solve the big root issue. But it can make people aware a bit more, which is something. "And that unfortunate woman does indeed have no home" And home is where your heart is. Homeless people also have their spots. Their living space, their sleeping space etc. it is just all in the open.
      • b112 4y ago
        Yes, they do have a home in the open, but they have no home. (This is how multiple definition words work)
    • braingenious 4y ago
      Changing terms appear to have enough meaning to compel you to try to stamp out others usage of language. Isn’t trying to impose your view of the necessity of the word “homeless” its own sort of virtue signaling, just of another virtue? (In this case, I’d assume the virtue you attempt to espouse is that of adherence to traditional social mores from your youth?)
      • throwawayacc3 4y ago
        It's not "imposing the necessity of the word", it's calling out the nonsensical euphemistic language that gets churned out by the most neurotic of society and then imposed upon everyone. George Carlin called this specific phenomenon out decades ago [0]. You can kvetch about using words that signal your virtue, but homelessness has a codified definition [1]. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY https://youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/
    • soupfordummies 4y ago
      Why don't you go argue about the semantics and terminology with your local "person who has no roof over their head" otherwise aren't you just kinda doing your own sort of virtue signaling by arguing about it on the Internet?
    • culi 4y ago
      > Home has more than one meaning. Exactly! > And that unfortunate woman does indeed have no home, even if she is living in her old home town. Oh. Interesting how you acknowledge the fluidity of the meaning of home but then impose your very specific formulation of it onto others You know how college students who live in dorms tend to differentiate between "home" (as in going back to their dorm after a night of drinking) and "home home" (as in I'm going back home over the weekend). Clearly there's a lot more to the definition of "home" here than just the shape of the building you sleep in. I don't think you have to be a romantic poet to relate to the feeling of feeling "at home" in the arms of someone you love. Or to move to an apt in a new city and have it never feel like home because you struggle to recreate the feeling of belonging to a community you felt previously Conversely, I'm sure many people relate to the feeling of it taking a while for a new "house" they moved in to really feel like "home". And there are some sleeping arrangements that might never feel like home like a college dorm or a stay at a hotel/motel > Changing terms is meaningless, as any stigma assigned to the prior term immediately exists for the new term. Not really what I'm trying to do. Just changing my own language to be more accurate to what I want to be talking about. Language changes. That's kinda its thing. If you wanna spend your life fighting the very nature of language you'll probably burn yourself out
      • CogitoCogito 4y ago
        > Oh. Interesting how you acknowledge the fluidity of the meaning of home but then impose your very specific formulation of it onto others Just as you're imposing your specific formulation? > Language changes. That's kinda its thing. If you wanna spend your life fighting the very nature of language you'll probably burn yourself out I would very surprised if "homeless" as a term were not used orders of magnitude more than "houseless". The standard term quite simply is "homeless". You (and your acquaintance) are the ones fighting the language. You may win and your terminology may become standard, but language has hardly evolved to the point where the people using the (supposedly) old terminology are fighting the tide. That said I find your acquaintance's position interesting. I don't, however, think that saying "houseless" instead of "homeless" is making the "language to be more accurate". "Home" has multiple meanings. With one of them your acquaintance is unquestionably "homeless" while with the other she is not. For what it's worth, I consider homeless people as members of the community and that the city is just as much their home as it is mine. I don't find the multiple meanings all that confusing.
  • mitthrowaway2 4y ago
    Thanks, I was also wondering about the recent change of terminology and this makes a lot of sense.
  • DoreenMichele 4y ago
    Unhoused might be a better term than houseless for your purposes. /2 cents
    • culi 4y ago
      I use houseless because it was what she suggested
      • DoreenMichele 4y ago
        That's presumably intended as both kind and respectful of you. I certainly appreciate the comments you have made here and you are, of course, free to use whatever terminology you so choose. FWIW: I have had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy, I spent nearly 6 years perma-camping and self-identifying as homeless and I have written about the topic on and off for years, mostly my own blogs but also sometimes paid articles on the topic.
        • culi 4y ago
          That's really great. I think that experience is something that's very often missing in online discourse and I'm glad to hear you sometimes write about it
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  There's a leftwing trop that the way to get attention and bring about change is to take charge of the words in the conversation. It goes back to an influential book called Keywords for Radicals. In this specific case the argument is that '[City or town] is their home, they just don't have access to housing' - which is true enough in that people who are homeless often still have strong social and community despite finding themselves living in a vehicle or on the street. Trying to redefine the conversation by changing the wording seems rather clumsy and inept to me, but also your objection it in overly pedantic. You can just keep using 'homeless' (as I do) and simply ignore side arguments about the semantics.
  • tssva 4y ago
    The latest effort I've come across is very much a right wing effort. Trying to rename Native Americans as First Immigrants.
    • b112 4y ago
      I detest any renaming such as this, and this is compounded here, as most native Americans were certainly not "first". Most archeological evidence I've read up on, shows those we call native americans, to be only one of a multitude of immigrant waves. And yes, their arrival displaced those already here, sometimes violently. Every beast and creature wars, and competes, for territory. Humans are no different.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        "Immigrant waves" ... probably not. Reaching the Americas from Asia, Africa, Europe by sea is probably not impossible and likely happened more than we tend to imagine, but was still extremely challenging. There has probably not been a multitude of immigrant waves. "Normal patterns of within-continent human migration" ... sure. My Hopi neighbor still (jokingly) calls the Dine (Navajo) "those Athabascans" (referring to the people of what is now British Columbia who migrated to what is now the US soutwest in the 1400s).
• braingenious 4y ago
  Fun fact! Words take on different meanings as they are used by differing groups of people! While you are correct that an apartment is not a house, did you know that they are considered to be a type of housing? Further, the concept of “housing” in English has been acceptable for many decades! It’s neat how English works!
• onetokeoverthe 4y ago
• nemo44x 4y ago
  We live in a time when even bums are concerned with their titles and how their status is conveyed.
• snapplebobapple 4y ago
  It is lefties to far lefties trying to reframe things to trick people into thinking if you give these people a house all their glaring other problems, like drug abuse, will magically disappear. It oversimplifies the problem, but is probably true for a very small percentage of homeless. The deceit is that that same small minority of homeless that this will actually work for would be helped far more by removing policies that are keeping housing prices artificially high, like the excessively restrictive zoning and long permitting processes and that would benefit everyone else except for the entrenched nimbys who pushed that crap in the first place to accumulate unjust gains for themselves.
  • recursive 4y ago
    Lefties may well do this, but this is kind of a nonsensical argument. The alleged oversimplification was already present with "homeless". How does "houseless" imply any simpler solution? Give 'em a home, give 'em a house. Both sound equally reductive to me.
    • snapplebobapple 4y ago
      This is the smart guy logic argument when politics is not governed by logic, it is governed by emotion and therefore marketing. Homeless does not oversimplify the problem in the same way that houseless does because homeless has all the negative connotations of people's experience with homeless associated it with it. The negative connotations of the actions of the homeless people the listener has come in contact with are brought up by that term so a listener with any experience will realize giving a homeless person a house will solve almost no problems and cost a huge amount of money. Whereas houseless is a new term with little to no baggage so it's easier to sell people obviously stupid ideas by changing the terms whenever the new term captures all the connotations of the old term. It's the euphemism treadmill abused for marketing rather than being used to describe the process of transferring meaning to overcome this kind of thing.
• PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Think of it as "house" as in "housing".