6 responses so far ↓

• 1 AemJeff // Aug 7, 2007 at 8:47 am

  Aren’t you nitpicking a couple of pretty innocuous euphemisms? Isn’t there at least some truth in both of them? “Underprivileged” might be more metaphorically true, but “underresourced,” particularly if less tangible attributes like quality are included in the calculus, seems like the literal truth. I don’t see how either term is either untrue, or even particularly misleading. Where’s the harm?

• 2 AemJeff // Aug 7, 2007 at 9:00 am

  A related thought.

  “Privilege,” is often used, conversely, as a euphemism for “personal access to capital.” Do you see a similar problem with that usage?

• 3 Julian Sanchez // Aug 7, 2007 at 9:02 am

  “Underresourced” is just not a word. Would a school with adequate funds, equipment, and personnel be “resourced”? I wouldn’t normally pick on this kind of thing, but it did jump out at me in a promo for an education program.

  Underprivileged makes no sense because a “privilege” is a special favor or advantage. It is, by definition, not the sort of thing everyone is supposed to have. You can wish to live in a society where nobody is poor, but it’s just incoherent to wish for a society in which “everybody is privileged,” though the “under” implies that this would be desirable.

• 4 Gordon Lightfoot // Aug 7, 2007 at 9:54 am

  Synonyms for poor:

  bad off*, bankrupt, beggared, beggarly, broke*, destitute, dirt poor*, down-and-out*, empty-handed*, flat*, flat broke*, fortuneless, hard up*, impecunious, impoverished, in need, in rags, in want, indigent, insolvent, low, meager, moneyless, necessitous, needy, pauperized, penniless, penurious, pinched*, played out, poverty-stricken, reduced*, scanty*, stone broke*, strapped*, suffering, tapped, truly needy, unprosperous.

  You know, of all these terms, poor is probably the least offensive. Well, impecunious and penurious seem harmless enough. There is an impulse to find a PC term for poor, since poor carries with it a number of negative associations unrelated to one’s financial situation. It seems like the problem isn’t really with the word, but with certain cultural assumptions the user might have. So you could maybe start floating “impecunious” around, but it wouldn’t be long before impecunious carried the same baggage poor does. The thing with underprivileged, Mr. Sanchez’s criticism notwithstanding, is that it’s an obvious PC word-it’s clearly intended to be a positive term to describe a person without a lot of money-when a person says it, it’s like hearing them say: you are poor, but poor in that unfortunate sense, not poor in that too lazy to keep a job longer than two weeks sense.

  So, anyway, I guess I’m for underprivileged even if the etymology of the word is off.

• 5 Julian Sanchez // Aug 7, 2007 at 10:49 am

  I think “poor” is sufficiently neutral in most cases, though I suppose there’s a problem of potential ambiguity in the context of education with constructions like “poor students.” Also, though this isn’t really an issue when one is talking about children, it’s certainly possible for an adult to be affluent but not “privileged,” or conversely to fall into poverty despite having enjoyed many privileges. Typically you do see the term used in reference to children, but it would sacrifice an important distinction if “privileged” & “underprivileged” came to be used as synonyms for “rich” & “poor” more generally.

• 6 Gordon Lightfoot // Aug 7, 2007 at 1:18 pm

  I’ve been trying to sort out what I think the potential implications of the use of the word poor are, and I’m in a muddle, because I’m not sure I can easily demonstrate that my intuitions about the word actually touch on anything significant. If you think that poor is a perfectly useful value neutral word, then there is no reason to deploy “underprivileged”. But if you think poor isn’t value neutral, even when it is nominally used to describe a person of low income, then you will be tempted to reach for a less suggestive label. By using “underprivileged,” a person is tacitly admitting that he is uncomfortable using the term poor in a particular context. It isn’t surprising that children are more frequently described as underprivileged than adults, since they are not considered responsible for their economic conditions.

  My feelings on the matter are complicated because I self identify with the term poor. There is an attitude of solidarity that some of us attach to that term, but not everyone who is nominally poor actually does. I could say I am comfortable with certain cultural features of the lower class, and that comfort wouldn’t disappear if I were to win the lottery tomorrow. I think when some really strapped people insist that they aren’t poor, they are saying that they don’t want to be associated with a particular set of social habits and attitudes. It seems like that’s a distinction that the general use of the word poor misses, and that the development of another label would be useful. Underresourced doesn’t quite cut it, but it’s a step in that direction. Mind you, I know the English language has enough words already. But there is an ecology of assumptions riding on the use of that one four letter word, and I am skeptical that this is always clearly understood.