I share with the Brits their annoyance with the American misuse of the word home to mean a house.
“In LA you can make $300,000 a year and still not be able to afford a home” is a sentence from a book I’m reading and it makes no sense until you remember that the author is clumsily trying to say that houses are expensive. But she makes it sound like people with these gigantic incomes are homeless.
Clarissa's Blog 
But she makes it sound like people with these gigantic incomes are homeless.
Quite a lot of American terminology develops for that purpose.
Do you spot these patterns in your daughter’s books? They’re painfully obvious there.
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Owning a house/home is a big part of what is often called the American Dream. It makes someone invested in their community, their school district, their town, state and country in ways that tenants and transients are not. When you own property in America you become a shareholder a stakeholder and a taxpayer rather than a serf or sharecropper. You take an interest in the direction your neighborhood, town, state or country are moving in. Owning houses makes for better families and better citizens. Homeless in the way your using it is a relatively new and fabricated word. In the not to distant past we called these people tramps or bums but never homeless.
Walnut
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That’s a good point. I detest the word “homeless”. But even this word has become beyond the pale. We are now supposed to say “unhoused” which I hate even more.
But I really like the argument you are advancing.
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What I find amusing is when TV characters use some of this politically correct language, like “unhoused” instead of “homeless.” For example, does your average police officer really use a word like “unhoused”?
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Police officers may have been forced to attend a training on that!
Normal people don’t use this word, though.
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” We are now supposed to say “unhoused”
Like “undocumented” it presupposes a kind of institutional failure that does not exist.
What does an “unhoused” person need? To be housed.
What does an “undocumented” person need? To be given documents.
Both are attempts to short circuit arguments about cause and effect and the role of government.
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This is why I prefer the word “Vagrant”. It cuts through the ambiguity.
Somebody who is couch-surfing with friends between leases, a family temporarily living with relatives, retirees living in RVs… these are not vagrants. We all know the difference.
-ethyl
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THANK YOU. When did we decide to lose the crucial distinction between these two words? A house is not a home!
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This is beautiful music.
I had a conversation about this with Klara, and she concluded that home is wherever we stay together as a family. It was very touching.
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