“Homeless” v. “Unhoused”
The politics of words.
Since we have been talking about messaging and words, I have noticed a growing ire on the site about the term “unhoused” being used in lieu of “homeless.”
I will start with full disclosure: I have no particular dog in this fight in the sense that this is not my area of expertise. I will say that while “unhoused” does not bother me, I tend to actually prefer “homeless” as I think it captures the situation, and that “unhoused” does not seem to necessarily solve some linguistic problem caused by “homeless.”
My sense is that activists think that “homeless” is passive, while “unhoused” suggests that there is an active unhousing of people due to policies that make an adequate housing supply unavailable. Also, I have seen that some activists note that “homeless” is inaccurate, as the individuals in question simply use the streets or shelters as their homes, and what they really lack is their own actual house. I fully see how all of that is debatable in terms of accuracy.
BTW, it seems worth noting that unhoused.org is a UK site, so the issue of using these words is not just one of American Democrats causing a problem, per se.
I honestly think a lot of the problem in these cases is that people simply don’t like change, and when they read or hear a term, they don’t expect it bumps them out of what they are consuming, and they find that annoying. Worse, it makes them stop and think about the words and which one is the proper one.
Now, if I am an advocate for the subject at hand, then that’s mission accomplished, isn’t it?
A similar example would be “slaves” versus “the enslaved.” See also, “undocumented” versus “illegal.”
There are arguments one can make about why some terms are more accurate than others. I am persuaded that “illegal alien” has a dehumanizing element to it. Indeed, it is not wholly accurate and, worse, we have certainly seen how people like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller have leveraged the notion of “illegals” to fuel their terror campaign. If they are all “illegal” then they are all criminals who deserve what they are getting!
Language matters. I would absolutely prefer that Americans, writ large, thought of non-citizens who lack certain visas as “undocumented” as opposed to “illegals.” It would be harder to dehumanize the “undocumented.” Granted, “illegal alien” is better than “wetback.”
And while “enslaved” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, I understand and support the idea of recentering the attention on the act of first kidnapping and raising human beings a chattel as opposed to passively labeling someone a slave.
Miles may, of course, vary.
Setting aside all of that, did the terminology switch get your attention? Are you talking about the topic, even if it is just to gripe?
Well, again, mission accomplished, yes?
And even if a given attempt at terminological tweaking does truly annoy you, did it really change your views of policy on the topic?
The last three paragraphs are why I tend not to let these things bother me. Further, the reality is that language is constantly evolving and that that evolution is often driven by political considerations. Sometimes reframing the way we all look at something (or getting us to look at it all) requires a little friction
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I remember being, oh, 4 or 5 years old and listening to my grandparents complain about having to use the word “African American” instead of “Black” (though that term was either never an issue or has returned back to being OK), and extending that gripe into how it was bad enough they had to start using “black” instead of other terms from the 60s (not the hard “r” very bad word, but the other word that starts with an “n” and which I do not know whether that causes offense anymore, even when being used in an historical sense.)
I further remember gripes in the late 90s about having to change word usage and how political correctness had gone to far.
It strikes me that the only constant is that language changes, and people gripe about language changing. Some people police the language changes, and other people police back, arguing against the changes.
They and their causes are equally bothersome or unbothersome, depending on your view. I’m unbothered by either side, the policers or the anti-policers, but clearly many are bothered by their respective antagonists.
ETA: Perhaps my example was a poor one, in that I make a point in not being bothered when someone asks to be referred in a certain way, stridently, actively, unbothered. You want me to use certain pronouns? Ok, it takes literally no effort on my part, mental or physical. Prefer “African American” instead of “Black?” No sweat. Want to be called “Her Lord Highness, commander of all that she sees, arbiter of the skies and seas” instead of your name? Alright that one’s a bit cumbersome, I may object to that, but only from laziness, not from spite.
Meanwhile, yesterday…
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) received criticism and ridicule on Monday after it began a meeting with an indigenous land acknowledgement.
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DNC chairman Ken Martin began the meeting by inviting Lindy Sowmick, a self-described “Indigenous queer woman,” to acknowledge that the land had been taken from the Dakota people.
“Good morning, DNC members, friends, and relatives. Let’s talk about the land for a second,” said Sowmick. “The DNC acknowledges and honors the Dakota Oyate, the Dakota people, who are the original stewards of the lands and waters of Minneapolis. The Dakota cared for the lands, lakes, and the Wakpa Tanka, the Great River, the Mississippi River for thousands of years before colonization.”
She concluded, “This land was not claimed or traded, it’s a part of a history of broken treaties and promises, and in many ways we still live in a system built to suppress indigenous people’s cultural and spiritual history.”
———————–
Performative bullshit at best. Out of touch, virtue signaling with absolutely zero electoral value at worst. THIS is what people mean when they say the Dems are out of touch. This is the DNC, not some random bro on Twitter.
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/dnc-criticized-for-starting-meeting-with-indigenous-land-acknowledgment-out-of-touch-with-american-voters/
@Neil Hudelson:
Indeed.
@EddieInCA:
For the sake of argument, I will stipulate that this is exactly what you are saying that it is. Do you honestly think it matters one iota in the grand scheme of things? That one vote was changed?
No, for real? The anti-word-policing crowd is now word policing? With all that’s going on rn, there’s time to direct “ire” towards…this?
What a privilege, to be able to waste such headspace because the incompetent pedo isn’t deporting you to a torture prisons without due process; destroying your job or small business with tariffs; or stripping you of Medicaid, Medicare, or Obamacare, or food stamps.
People will use whatever words they want. That is decidedly less important than Harris presentibg a serious, detailed affordable housing plan — to juice America’s housing supply, support renters, and create homeownership. While Trump ran on increasing, poverty, despair, homelessness, and crime: gutting healthcare and food aid, cutting taxes for billionaires, implementing trickle down and stupid tariffs that kill jobs and small businesses, the economy, and the dollar.
Maybe the Third Way and their ilk might assist Dem candidates in focusing attention on issues that matter. Rather than taking Lefty and MAGA distraction bait, amplifying Extremely Online word games and culture war fluff with little tangible effect on anyone’s physical well-being or bank account.
There are serious disturbances happening. We have serious problems to fix. Are modern Americans ever — ever — going to grow up, get focused, and get serious, so we might join our Western peer nations (polling far higher on the Global Happiness Index) in providing a 21st century quality-of-life? Not looking good.
@Neil Hudelson:
What I this is important to note is that a key thing about that original shift and the shift back was that if I remember correctly, both actions largely came from within the community. Of course not everyone within the community agreed with the name change. Heck, I’m sure there were folks within the Black community who thought things should have stopped with Negro. But generally speaking, both appeared to have been forms of self-determination.
I think its fair to contrast that with “Latnix.” I definitely know folks of Hispanic/Chicano/Latina/o (a)/Mexican/Central American/South American descent who used that. They also tended to be younger and from more academic backgrounds. But generally, it was never broadly accepted within the community and tended to be used more by folks outside the community that in it.
However, there is also a big difference between “the Black community” and the “Hispanic/Chicano/Latina/o (a)/Mexican/Central American/South American” communities. The first has historically and broadly been a community in the US created through chattel slavery and then 150+ years of systemic oppression that essentially reinforced that community.
There really isn’t a “Latino” community in the same way. In part, that’s because so many came here through immigration and were not bound together by the same collective trauma and history. This has been a huge issue–especially lately with Democrats and former Democrats turned heterodox critics in their later years–you can’t apply White/Black race relations to that large collection of folks.
And one way that shows is the fact that about the only way to use a term that people within that generalized ethic group agree to is to have to write something like: people of Hispanic/Chicano/Latina/o (a)/Mexican/Central American/South American descent. And even there, I know I missed folks (Cubanos, I know you are out there and you don’t want to be lumped in with the rest of those peasants).
@Steven L. Taylor:
——–For the sake of argument, I will stipulate that this is exactly what you are saying that it is. Do you honestly think it matters one iota in the grand scheme of things? That one vote was changed?——-
I think it drives away a small amount of people who might otherwise be open to Dem policy positions. People vote emotionally, and this sort of thing divides unnecessarily. This make me, a self-identifing progressive, say”WTF?” It’s not going to change my vote, but I an see it driving away a small subset of voters.
Being older I just accept that I have a strong tendency to use the terms I have used most of my life. If I find out something is truly offensive I try to eliminate it but if its one of the arguments about how one word is a bit different than another but I cant figure out why I no longer bother with it that much. I find myself using both and if one does actually become dominant figure I will just naturally gravitate.
Steve
BTW, I’m definitely someone who works in a area where we do use many of those “banned” terms. When I started in the civic arena, I definitely questioned some of them. In general, I have adopted a rule that I try to see how the people I’m interacting with refer to themselves, then, in some cases, ask if it’s ok I to do that, and then move forward.
Shifting back from “African American” was a bit of a challenge initially. I will still alternate between that and Black in a lot of cases–if purely to make the writing seem less repetitive.
However, I want to unpack (again) one of these examples that I don’t think I will change–in part because it’s essential to make this point.
After working in and around the system for many years, I can no longer refer to “the criminal legal system” and “the criminal justice system.” While the intent of the system might be justice, the practice and impact of the system are focused on the smooth execution of the law.
To pick perhaps the most extreme example, you cannot look at what is happening with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, including the most recent, especially egregious attempt at plea bargaining and tell me that anything there is about justice.
Ditto the emergence of coercive plea bargaining (and the trial tax) as a necessary creation to keep the court running as serving the goal of justice.
Or the utter abysmal rate of clearances (resolving of police investigations) across the US as serving justice (especially to victims).
Hell, we have a Supreme Court where at least one justice has taken the position that there is nothing unconstitutional about executing a person who is known to be innocent, so long as they have been given all of the proper legal due process.
For many people, their choice of the language they use is just as political. Because like everything, language (and language choice and code switching) is always already political.
Additionally, I am honestly skeptical that, for example, my switching to say “the criminal justice system” would in any way get someone to buy into the argument that the system rarely consistently delivers justice.
I think writers have a different relationship with words. Allow me to elucidate.
A fiction writer isn’t just trying to paint a picture, although that’s a big part of the job, a fiction writer is trying to evoke emotion in a person the writer does not know, who may be reading in the present, or may be reading in some distant future, who may be reading in Iowa, or may be reading in Katmandu, who may be male, female, old or young. It’s not as easy as it looks.
Words are my tool set, just like a carpenter has a set of tools, a chef has a set of tools, a mechanic has a set of tools. When someone, anyone, tells me what word to use my instant reaction is, ‘fuck you’. Which seems overly-sensitive and belligerent. But what reaction would you expect if you were to tell a carpenter to use a different screwdriver? How well do you think your mechanic would react if you told him he’s using the wrong wrench? What reaction would you get from a chef if you interrupted his work to tell him he’s using the wrong knife?
The carpenter and the mechanic would tell you to fuck off and the chef would threaten to stab you.
Even by the standards of my profession, I am reluctant to accept editing*. In fact I’ve been edited very little compared to most writers because I am both arrogant and more importantly, right. Just because everyone uses words and knows how to form a sentence does not mean you can do what I do. Can the average literate person write a story that has people 30 years later burst into tears? I can, and 99.9% of perfectly intelligent, educated, literate people, cannot.
You don’t tell Mozart** what notes to use and you don’t tell me what words to use. Unhoused is in no way preferable to homeless and telling me I have to use one and not the other is just the impertinent, self-important meddling of amateurs.
*A huge bitch
**Yeah, that is a bit much.
@Matt Bernius: I have a similar reaction to “American health care system”. A) Its primary focus seems to be profit more than healthcare, and B) it’s not a system, it’s a collection.
@EddieInCA: To be clear, I am not being as argumentative as perhaps I appear to be, but is it not also possible some very small number of left-leaners like that stuff and therefore there is a bit of an offset?
Granted, my priors are that the DNC doesn’t matter all that much…
@Michael Reynolds:
You have made orders of magnitude more money than I have writing, and have certainly had more eyeballs encounter your words than have mine. And I get that you write fiction.
But do you think maybe you are being more than a tad condescending here? You know, at least a tad?
(Note, as a writer I am using understatement to convey a point and tone).
@Michael Reynolds: P.S. There is a difference between editing/telling a specific person what words to use and having other people use those words or arguing that one word is more appropriate than another in some vast, societal context, yes?
@EddieInCA: “ I think it drives away a small amount of people who might otherwise be open to Dem policy positions. People vote emotionally, and this sort of thing divides unnecessarily. This make me, a self-identifing progressive, say”WTF?” It’s not going to change my vote, but I a see it driving away a small subset of voters.”
Fun fact: Native Americans vote. Nevada and Arizona are swing states with a large Native-American population relative to the difference between Republican and Democratic voters. And I expect there are local races, or maybe even House races, where a similar calculus applies.
Here’s something about the ways their vote is being suppressed, which says that Michigan and Montana also have large enough Native populations to swing votes. (I learned something while skimming)
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/study-finds-extensive-barriers-restrict-native-americans-voting
The land acknowledgement is pandering to these voters. Does it cause more harm than good despite that? I have no idea. But people like being seen, and this almost certainly helps with Native American voters.
Not all houses are homes, and the word “unhoused” rather than “homeless” helps distinguish people living on the street from that guy Larry who has almost no furniture, hasn’t hung anything on the walls, and hasn’t made any effort to make his apartment a home.
We might be able to build housing to give an unhoused person a roof over their heads, but there’s absolutely nothing we can do to help Larry.
@Michael Reynolds: One last thought, to find some common ground, I understand the impulse to react negatively when one’s own work is questioned.
I think it is proper to ask the subject what word to use. People with trisomy 21 prefer Down syndrome to mongoloid. I called a woman doing card reading a Roma, and she was pleased. The guys at intersections holding cardboard saying “Homeless, please help” are still using that word, and when they change, I will also.
We should ignore the perpetually more aggrieved than thou class who are not members of the target demographic.
In the early 1990s there was a book called The Official Politically Correct Dictionary, a tongue-in-cheek look at all the supposedly ridiculous PC coinages. If you bother to look at the book’s citations, it lumps together various things, including the fringe theories of a few academics with very little relevance; phrases that were created purely as satire and which have never been used in earnest (such as “vertically challenged” for a short person); and actual terms that had already caught on by then, some of which have since become so ingrained that few people blink an eye at them today: terms like Native American, Asian American, Latino, diversity, homophobia, substance abuse, and vegan. Go back even further, you find complaints over the title Ms., which seems about the most justified linguistic change imaginable.
The backlash against PC–now retitled as “wokeness”–works on a lot of people because it plays on a sense of newness in language as intrinsically weird, and when the coinages are offered to replace existing vocabulary, it’s easy to paint the entire project as a sort of neo-Victorian sanitization of language, with sexual puritanism having been replaced by liberal puritanism.
Sometimes these coinages are vulnerable to criticism, especially when it comes to the euphemism treadmill, which is kind of the opposite extreme of resisting newness–after a term has settled comfortably into the language for long enough, it soon begins to seem problematic for the same reasons as the terms it once replaced. The term retarded was introduced around the late 19th century as a substitute for terms like moron and imbecile, which used to be technical terms for people with exceptionally low IQs. Changes in language can’t magically erase negative societal attitudes toward whomever or whatever the original terms were being applied to, they can only mask them for a period of time.
The problem is that most people who complain about these changes aren’t interested in getting into a serious debate over the utility of specific changes, they’re at bottom making an appeal to the visceral reactions people feel to the suggestion that speech they’ve been using all their lives is somehow tainted, like trying to explain to grandma why terms like “cotton-picking” or “jew down” shouldn’t be uttered. That’s why Republicans find the issue so useful, and why so many Dems want to do a mad scramble away from it, which ends up only reinforcing the idea that the party has been taken over by joyless censorial scolds. It’s one of the GOP’s greatest weapons over the past several decades.
@Matt Bernius: “ And one way that shows is the fact that about the only way to use a term that people within that generalized ethic group agree to is to have to write something like: people of Hispanic/Chicano/Latina/o (a)/Mexican/Central American/South American descent. And even there, I know I missed folks (Cubanos, I know you are out there and you don’t want to be lumped in with the rest of those peasants).”
I go with “Latino communities” using the plural in all cases. I’m sure there are some people of mixed or unmixed heritage from one spot or another who feel excluded by that, but my main purpose is to remind white people (including myself!) that there isn’t a single Latino community that can be treated like a block.
@Matt Bernius: We don’t have a Department of Corrections, either. It’s a Department of Punishment.
@Gustopher:
Thank you for that.
I use the plural a lot to accomplish that goal. However, I don’t think I have really used it in this way (at least not intentionally and consistently). You just changed the way I’m going to communicate (at least for as long as I can remember to do that).
@becca:
Great point!
(“Reply” key is back. Still no bold or italic or other style choices available.)
@Neil Hudelson:..I remember being, oh, 4 or 5 years old and listening to my grandparents complain about having to use the word “African American” instead of “Black”
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I was riding in the back seat of our car with my dad driving and his dad in the front passenger seat in Danville, Illinois circa 1960-61 which puts me in the 7th or 8th grade. My dad stopped at a gas station so Gramps could use the restroom. When he returned to the car he said “There was an old darkie in there.”
“Pop, we don’t call them that anymore!” my dad said.
It was the first time that I had ever heard anyone in my family use any word other than colored or negro. I can honestly say that I never heard my parents make any disparaging remarks about anyones race or religion or nationality.
Thanks mom. Thanks dad. RIP
I feel like perhaps it is time to acknowledge that a lot of the people who say they are offended by these terms start out *wanting* to be offended, and then find a way to make that happen.
I definitely roll my eyes at the land acknowledgement, which I have myself only seen at one of our local theaters. But it doesn’t suddenly make me reassess all my priorities and beliefs and decide ‘Hmmm, maybe Trump is right!’.
@Steven L. Taylor:
If some person on Twitter decides that the word Latino is wrong and should be replaced by a word that better expresses the Anglosphere’s contempt for all things foreign, I end up losing the word. That’s how it works now. Literally if some rando on social media with the right sort of followers says X is to replace Y then X gets replaced by Y. Until some equally unserious amateur decides no, now Y is unacceptable and we must use Z.
Here’s the thing: I’m not writing for this instant, I need people 10 or 20 years down the road to be able to understand WTF I’m trying to convey. So being bullied into some euphemism that exists solely to satisfy the very short-term needs of some self-important, hair shirt-wearing college kid, does in fact, have a negative impact on me. And on anyone else who needs to use language creatively.
And none of it improves anything. As I’ve pointed out before we’ve been through half a dozen words used to describe people of African backgrounds and yet George Floyd still ends up being choked to death by a cop. Changing the word does not change the reality. It never has. It never will. A rose by any other name. . .
Unhoused is particularly stupid. Objects can be housed, humans have homes. It’s a replacement word that is actually demeaning. I DGAF if in the seminar you use jargon appropriate to the subject, but once you apply a moral judgment to the word, it becomes a sort of civil censorship. IRL example: being called out for saying the war in Ukraine would retard Russian economic development.
Stop policing words. The words are not the problem. The storm tunnels of Las Vegas are full of people who are housed there, but who do not have homes.
I said something like this yesterday but the site ate my comment:
Being politicized by the switch from ‘homeless’ to ‘unhoused’ is much like being politicized because Cracker Barrel switched its logo. It’s politics based on the weakest connection to reality. Like you just can’t be a good sport and do normal things on a daily basis and not freak out about a logo or the word unhoused. That would be nuts.
Watching the Mamdani campaign has been instructive: you have weirdos attempting to mock him because of how much he benches, not like those totally normal dudes like RFK Jr and Pete Hegseth. Mamdani, however, is brilliant. He’s able to do politics at a level where this stuff comes off as weak as it is.
@Gustopher: Also this.
@Michael Reynolds:
I know you know that that is not what we are talking about. You are moving the goalposts yet again.
These conversations are not about what your editor tells you, or what randos are saying.
You don’t seriously think that these messaging and politics-of-words conversations are about randos on Twitter, do you?
I think most of this is explained by what Steven Pinker called the “euphemism treadmill” 30 years ago (https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/1994_04_03_newyorktimes.pdf).
Over time, people create new words that supposedly have less stigma or negative connotation, yet those terms eventually become stigmatized, and the cycle repeats.
– Idiot/moron/imbecile (once medical classifications) became “retarded” which is now verboten, and replaced with “special needs” or “intellectually disabled.”
– Crippled to handicapped to disabled to differently abled
– Vagrant/hobo became homeless, and now people are trying on “unhoused” for size. We’ll see if it sticks.
– Negro used to be the perfectly normal term for black people, then it became black, then briefly African American, but now seems to be going back to black.
This is such a long-standing and normal aspect of language change that it doesn’t really bother me – it’s going to happen regardless of what I think. Sometimes these efforts fail, and sometimes they succeed. My view is that during a period of change or attempted change, people ought to be less strident about language policing from either direction.
However, I think the fundamental flaw with the desire to change language in this way is that it very rarely succeeds. Hence the treadmill. The assumption that one can alter people’s views on underlying truths and attitudes by creating a new term or attempting to redefine an existing term is, at best, a temporary victory.
@Michael Reynolds:
As a writer, I would think you would have a greater grasp of what the word “censorship” means. Or perhaps I am to infer that “sort of” is doing a lot of work in the construction.
Should one feel censored if some rando doesn’t understand the way the word “retard” is used above?
It would perhaps annoy me, but I wouldn’t feel censored.
I have never felt compelled, BTW, to use “unhoused” (the search function tells me I have used it one other time).
@EddieInCA:
Agree and would add that the irony of land acknowledgments is that they are definitionally “blood and soil” logic – the idea that the land really belongs to a specific ethnic or religious group and not the people who currently live there or who have lived there for generations.
@Andy: I think there is something to this.
But I aslo think that we have clear examples of positive change in terms of social pressure to use less pejorative terms for minorities.
And, as I note above, the use of “illegals” has clearly helped justify the current crackdown.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think “illegals” is just the right attempting to do a similar thing that the left is doing with “undocumented.” Will “illegals” become the normal term for foreigners who are not in the US under conditions consistent with US law? I highly doubt it.
I asked ChatGPT (caveats apply) to list the terms used in other English-speaking countries, and these were listed along with links to various government and NGO sources: illegal migrant, illegal entrant, irregular migrant, unauthorized migrant, inadmissible foreign national, unlawful non-citizen, overstayer (for lapsed visas), illegal foreigner.
I think anyone with a basic grasp of English understands that those are all talking about largely the same thing. Which one is currently the least pejorative is entirely subjective IMO.
@Steven L. Taylor:
BTW, I like the new avatar picture – looks like retirement is agreeing with you!
@Michael Reynolds:
You first.
@EddieInCA:
Performative bullshit at best. Out of touch, virtue signaling with absolutely zero electoral value at worst. THIS is what people mean when they say the Dems are out of touch. This is the DNC, not some random bro on Twitter.
…………………………………………
Could not agree more.
Period. End of story.
@Andy:
I suppose my point is that “illegal alien/immigrant” was the norm already.
Also, wanting to call people “illegals” so it is more justifiable to round them up versus wanting to call them “undocumented” because you want them treated more humanely does rather underscore that word choices can matter and is often revelatory about the person using the language, yes?
@Andy: Thanks! And it does!
@EddieInCA: I have a standard line that liberal errors tend to look silly and cost money. Conservative errors tend to cost a lot of money and get people killed.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Yes, that’s the intent on each side. As far as those word choices mattering, yes they do serve as signalling to project where one stands or what tribe one belongs to on this or a host of similar divides. However, until they become normal outside of a particular in-group and are accepted as the standard terms by broader society, then they don’t matter much beyond the language and culture wars, which are never-ending. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think either “illegals” or “undocumented” has supplanted the current terms used by most people. The same applies to a large list of other words that various groups and ideologies have sought to promote as alternatives that have yet to be fully accepted by normie English speakers.
@Andy: I think you are eliding a clear moral divide between “illegal” and “undocumented.” This is not just about tribalism.
Isn’t the common term “illegal alien/immigrant” with “illegal” being a common shortening? And does the framing of these persons as “illegal aliens” play into the Homan/Miller narrative?
@Andy: “Negro used to be the perfectly normal term for black people, then it became black, then briefly African American, but now seems to be going back to black.”
90% sure Black is capitalized now. Hope that helps!
I’ve heard it explained that it’s like capitalizing Asian, but they don’t come from Blacksylvania, so I find that less than compelling. I would note that describing Trump as a White rather than white carries a whole lot of meaning, though, making his pale skin tone less of a description and more of an identity.
Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of black folks online using Black, as it is an identity more than a mere descriptor. Does that make me Queer rather than queer? Dunno, check back in a bit.
I do like capitalizing Things for emphasis, so maybe. It’s something I guess I share with Trump, but I don’t think Things ever need to be emphasized so much that they are THINGS. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
(I also love “Thank you for your attention to this matter” — this bit of annoying business speak will be forever tainted and unusable going forward. I want him to start using Synergy and Proactive.)
@Steven L. Taylor: I’ve never referred to illegal aliens so often that I need a shortened form. Or undocumented immigrants. Or hairless cats.
(I never know whether a comment will be serious or not until I’m done. I think this started serious though. “Hairlesses” sounds horrible.)
@Michael Reynolds: Well, I’ll address you first. Everyone has some level of dedication to their own autonomy, and word use is part of that. Your level of dedication, by your own admission, is very, very high. I can respect that. I don’t know though that it contributes all that much to your success as a writer. Maybe some, maybe not.
I know other writers that are edited, and they also seem pretty interesting and engaging.
Enough of that, though. If someone wants me to use a different one than the one I have been using, I want to know the reasoning behind it. Or the emotional association that might drive the change. This is how I engage my own autonomy.
With “unhoused” replacing “homeless” I wonder why the change. On thing that comes to mind is that “house” does not equal “home”. And I’ve known some “homeless” people who had a home under the overpass. Or in the garage and backyard of an abandoned house. So maybe it’s more accurate? Maybe people think “homeless” is dehumanizing?
I’m not sure I have ever witnessed anyone policing “unhoused” instead of “homeless” though. So I’ll probably keep on using “homeless”. At least in most contexts.
“Home is anywhere you hang your head” – Elvis Costello, and maybe someone before him.
@Gustopher:
A few years ago I was reading a book about the Trump Administration that at one point quotes something he said orally, but capitalizes the B in Black within the quotation–which struck me as more than a little odd, since I don’t particularly recall him ever spelling the word that way himself (and if he ever did, it would probably be just a reflection of his habit of randomly capitalizing all sorts of words), and I bet he’s never even heard of this change (first introduced in 2020). It had the feel like they were putting words in his mouth, because it’s doubtful he was thinking Black with a capital B when he uttered the word.
@Gustopher:..”hairless”
“Fur challenged” is more appropriate.
@Neil Hudelson:
The third constant is people will argue more over language changes than over tipping.
And more stridently, too.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I never claimed it was just about tribalism, but clearly that’s a pretty big component, yes? And as for eliding the moral divide, I’m not eliding anything. From my point of view, our discussion so far has not been about the morality of illegal vs undocumented. If you want to take the convo there, then fine, but it would be nice if you could just ask what I think instead of presumptively assuming I’m avoiding something.
To get gnat’s ass about it, I think there’s a difference – including morally – between “illegal immigrants” and “illegals” with the latter coming off to me as intentionally pejorative. And like all language, context matters a great deal, including the verbal and visual cues from someone actually speaking. Words don’t exist in isolation when it comes to definitions and greater meaning.
Illegal aliens was the norm in our youth until about the 2000’s IIRC, and “alien” is still a word used in many laws. My pet theory is that the alien craze in the 90’s, particularly shows like X-Files, were instrumental in making it verboten for immigrants.
As far as “playing” into narratives, I pretty much reject that kind of framing. Using established and largely accepted descriptive terms like “illegal immigrant” that have been around long before Homan/Miller came into the scene doesn’t play into their narrative unless one allows it to, and cedes the term to them. It’s very much like a bunch of 4Chan trolls turning the OK hand symbol into a White supremacy gang sign as a joke.
In an academic sense, I think both “undocumented immigrants” and “illegal immigrants” are both problematic and not completely accurate. There are a lot of categories of immigrants, and these terms are at best insufficient. However, I’m unsure what would be better. Maybe unauthorized would be better? What is your opinion?
@Gustopher:
Opinions vary quite a bit on that, but I do try to remember to capitalize it. Unfortunately, I often fail to do so, mainly because my typing muscle memory frequently doesn’t cooperate. I still, BTW, put two spaces after a period 90% of the time. Annoys the shit out of the millennials I work with. Sorry, can’t break the habit, I was, at my peak, an 80+ WPM guy on a Selectric. I think you are old enough to know what I’m talking about.
Anyway, I agree that my sentence looks weird with ‘African American’ capitalized, but ‘Black’ not, and I should have capitalized it.
This would be an example of consistency – if we’re going to capitalize Black, then Queer should be too, along with all similar terms in context, as long as the rule is clear and linguistically and intellectually consistent.
It’s kind of like ending something with, “Thanks for coming to my TED Talk” which is a phrase I’ve occasionally used sarcastically, but yeah, the dated corpo-speak is eye-rolling at least. We really need a paradigm shift on that and implement some best practices to fix it. Maybe when the TQM program is finally up and running.