Letter to the editor in the New York Times of 27 June (from James Bloom of Bethlehem, Pa.):<\/p>\n
Paul Krugman's observations [\"Home Not-So-Sweet Home\", column of 23 June] about our uncritical bias in favor of home ownership and the widespread attitude toward home renters as second-class citizens calls to mind an exchange I had several years ago while ordering a pizza.<\/p>\n
When I told the delivery dispatcher my address, she asked, \"Is that an apartment or a home?\"<\/p>\n
I still don't know what the right answer would have been, though the pizza did arrive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I was at first baffled by Bloom's bafflement, until I realized he was understanding home<\/em> to refer one's domicile, the place where one lives, which could be either a house or an apartment (he might also have been assuming — contrary to fact — that apartments are only rented rather than owned, but this isn't clear from his story). The delivery dispatcher, on the other hand, was using home<\/em> to mean 'house', and was asking whether the delivery was to be made to a residence accessible from the street or whether the deliverer would have to gain access to the interior of the building.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, MWDEU<\/em> has a (fairly long) entry on home<\/em> vs. house<\/em>, observing that some writers have criticized home<\/em> 'house' on the grounds that homes are not merely residences but come with an emotional attachment lacking for mere houses; that others have criticized it on class grounds (a criticism that goes back at least to Emily Post in 1927); that still others have criticized it as a genteelism, a device of real-estate agents and advertising writers (though MWDEU<\/em> notes that \"the usage is much older than modern real-estate agents\"); and that other usage writers have noted that for many \"ordinary prose writers\" (and the pizza delivery dispatcher), home<\/em> and house<\/em> are often interchangeable. For Bloom (and many other modern speakers and writers), however, home<\/em> is distinguished from house<\/em>.<\/p>\n
A final note on home ownership: MWDEU<\/em> reports that \"a number of commentators have remarked on the tendency to buy a home and sell a house\".<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Letter to the editor in the New York Times of 27 June (from James Bloom of Bethlehem, Pa.): Paul Krugman's observations [\"Home Not-So-Sweet Home\", column of 23 June] about our uncritical bias in favor of home ownership and the widespread attitude toward home renters as second-class citizens calls to mind an exchange I had several […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}