Should you find yourself strolling along Colorado’s Boulder Creek, be careful where you step. It seems that no small number of homeless have taken up residence there, and not only are they are in the habit of leaving trash hither and yon, so too waste of a more personal nature. “The conditions—feces and used toilet paper, in addition to heaps of litter and homeless property,” writes the Boulder Daily Camera, “are not only off-putting, but have prompted concerns about sanitation in one of the city’s premier spots for outdoor recreation.”
An unpleasant situation, no doubt. But what caught The Scrapbook’s attention was a different sort of sanitation altogether—the verbal sort. Though the word “homeless” has not yet been made verboten, it’s only a matter of time, as it seems a new euphemism is gaining favor—the “unhoused.” Thus, the Daily Camera writes that “the unhoused and unsheltered who sleep in hidden spots along Boulder Creek are opting in certain cases to relieve themselves outdoors, to the chagrin of public officials and many visitors to the area.”
One of those visitors is Alli Fronzaglia, the head of the Boulder Hiker Chicks club. She’s hep to the newly correct lingo: “I’m very sympathetic to the situation with the unhoused community, and I don’t want to demonize them,” she says.
Thus is the natural progression of euphemism. A term describing something unpleasant comes to have, by association, unpleasant overtones. And so a new, untainted term—for example, once upon a time, the homeless—is found to avoid the unpleasantness. But soon enough the new term begins to take on the odor of the word it replaced and a shiny new euphemism must be found.
Not only is this silly, it’s a shame, as the hunt for ever more bland and inoffensive terms for vagabonds denies us the rich and wonderful vocabulary the English language provides for the fellows.
Must we forgo such fine, direct, and descriptive terms as idler and loafer? Must we miss out on the specificity afforded us by our linguistic heritage? For example, there are bums and there are stew-bums (that is, bums who are on the sauce). Beggars might be not just panhandlers but plingers, mumpers, spongers, and (thanks to Yiddish) schnorrers.
A bindle man carries all his belongings in a bundle. A dosser creeps about in low places looking for some place to sleep.
Go back to the 17th century and the terminology is as delightful as it is descriptive. Jack-out-of-doors—a vagrant. Hedge-bird—a scoundrel vagrant. Bess o’ Bedlam—a lunatic vagrant.
Vagrancy may be a sad condition, but is it made any less sad by the empty correctitude of modern language? Member of the unhoused community? Should it ever come to that, The Scrapbook would rather be a tramp.
