Herald shouldn’t write around ‘homeless’ term

I appreciate The Herald’s work reporting on matters of interest to Snohomish County, but the newspaper’s insistence on referring to the homeless as “people living with homelessness” drives one to distraction.

Nobody talks this way, not even those who you quote who work with the homeless. What’s next? Traffic stories about “people living with a commute”? Sports news about “people living with baseball”? Crime reports on “people living with imprisonment”?

These are commuters, athletes and prisoners. And the homeless. Homeless people.

That’s how people talk. None of these groups are defined or valued as people solely by the aspect of their lives that are newsworthy, but we of the readership already know that. No need to spell it out in a way that sounds contrived.

Please get rid of “living with” and anything in subsequent reports with the possible exception of pets and family members.

Karl Schweizer

Lake Stevens