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I don't think homeless people call themselves 'a person experiencing homelessness' either.

• nailer 4y ago
  In autism land (which is a cool place you all should visit) there's a discussion about 'person first language'. I haven't made my mind up either way.
  • philwelch 4y ago
    Is this the logic whereby "colored people" is an offensive slur while "people of color" is the preferred nomenclature? My primary complaint with this stuff is the same as my primary complaint with corporate/marketing/bureaucratic jargon: it's just ugly and overcomplicated language. I wish we could speak plainly instead of dressing up our language in ugly fashions.
    • alvarezbjm-hn 4y ago
      I wish there could be black, white, yellow, red people. I wish skin color wasn't a slur. The word is not the problem, the will to be offensive is. "Colored people" and "Fair skin" do sound problematic for me.
    • acdha 4y ago
      One thing to remember is that there’s also a generational aspect: an older friend mentioned that basically everyone his age referred to themselves as Black, there was a middle group favoring people of color, and the younger people he knew were back to Black. My general preference is using whatever term someone prefers for themselves but that doesn’t scale to large groups of any sort.
    • nailer 4y ago
      I get that - it sounds silly. But also people have been abused by others yelling that. I’m an Aussie. I live the UK. Nobody takes offence to people calling me Aussie. That’s because nobody was ever beaten up by anyone yelling “Aussie” at them. If I was from Pakistan that wouldn’t be true though, so the shortened version of Pakistani is considered “the P word” in the UK.
• uxp100 4y ago
  But my (limited) experience is that they don’t use homeless either. The few people I knew used to talk about “sleeping rough” or something like that.