| HN Mirror

I don’t think this phrasing is the worst progressive “improvement” in language (that award goes to “Latinx”, seriously please stop using this), but it is kind of awkward and the standard is not applied evenly. We don’t say someone is “experiencing hunger”, we say they’re hungry, despite hunger typically being a temporary condition.

Edit: your point about the need to understand the background level of housing instability in less well off population is completely valid. I don’t think people understand the extent to which large portions of the working poor continually cycle through housing crises.

Edit 2: My broader point is that if you do consider educating people about the true facts/nature of homelessness in US cities, you should seriously question how much using the preferred progressive phrasing actually accomplishes that goal vs just making you sound elitist. Even under the most generous interpretation, there is nothing in the plain language of the phrase “experiencing X” as compared to the adjective form of X that even attempts confer any information as to whether X is a temporary or permanent condition. This is an an attempt to use language as a form of persuasion that does not even try to engage with the basic reality of how people are going to respond to that language. There are already predefined ways in English to denote temporary vs permanent, “chronic “ and “acute” would be appropriate in a scholarly context, “short-term”/“temporary” and “long-term”/“permanent” work perfectly fine in casual conversation.