Homeless By Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen addresses her experience engaging with homeless people in Homeless to remind readers that homeless people are real people, not some imaginary publicly debated community. Quindlen supports her case by not beginning her article with a generalization of what it means to be homeless, but rather by telling the true story of Ann: "Her name was Ann, and we met in the Port Authority Bus Terminal many Januaries ago" (Quindlen 13). "The metaphor the author uses when she says "We turn the adjective into the noun" (Quindlen 42) is truly incredible if one thinks of linguistic meanings of the words noun and adjective.

Adjectives are used to give people and objects general characteristics so that it would be easier to recognize them. The risk of creating and supporting a social stigma by “turning the adjective into the noun” is what worries Ann Quindlen. Adjectives are not what the objects or people truly are. They are the characteristics that can often be formal. For millions of homeless people, homeless is just the adjective that means that they have been through some struggle that deprived them of permanent homes. Yet, people are so clueless and cruel that they choose to support the stereotypes about homeless people. They see homelessness as the most important thing about the person, when it is really just an unfortunate aspect of someone’s life that cannot be used to label people. People deserve understanding and empathy regardless of their backstory, taking into account that homeless people do nothing wrong to others. When using the word homeless as a noun, people forget that the real noun in the collocation homeless people is people. First and foremost, all of the homeless are people. Each of them has their own unique background story that entirely differs from others, even if some details of biographies are similar. All in all, it appears the only way to defeat the social stigma about homelessness is make everyone see real personality and the story behind the nameless stereotype of a homeless person. If everyone tried to do so, it would be easier for society to solve the issue of homelessness through recognition of the real problems of real people and not some nameless statistics.

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Work Cited

Quindlen, Anna. "Homeless". Newsweek, 1987.