The word “shelter” is a good one. Gimme shelter, someone sang. Shakespeare used it in Pericles — “the leafy shelter that abuts against the island’s side” — I use the bus shelter on my street and the homeless go to shelters when death beckons on Toronto’s most frigid damp night sidewalks.

From posh to poetic to prosaic, the word announces its own nature. There’s a warmth to it. Who doesn’t want shelter?

Kira Heineck of the Toronto Alliance to End Homelessness wants to change the name of homeless shelters. She told the CBC that they’re not so much shelters as they are “centres that are much more about helping people find housing.” Activist Mark Horvath, formerly homeless, says changing the word will reduce “stigma” as the general public becomes more informed about homelessness.

So the city began a study on renaming homeless shelters. I filled out the online survey. It suggested “shelter” could be replaced by names such as Connect Services, Link Services, Housing Centres, First Step Housing and Services, Bridge Housing and Services, Stopover Services, Touchdown Services, and Navigation Centres.

None of the choices were good, with shelters being made to sound like living under actual bridges — which is homelessness itself — highway fast-food places, airport lounges or air traffic control.

Then there were three choices for the definition of a shelter: a place to people to “find safety and meet their basic needs,” to “access housing and services,” and to “come together.”

These choices don’t work either. The first is what I would call my house plus hugs, kisses, etc., the second sounds like a welfare office (now called social assistance, which is what I call Lost & Found) and the third is either group therapy or a local choir.

Jargon makes me restless. I like expressive, vivid language, not a dry bloodless antiseptic malformation of a word that expresses a human craving for food, water and a roof over one’s head, winter protection from icy cold and summer shade from the baking crisping sun.

“Shelter” expresses an immediate need. I don’t follow the suggestion that it’s just a stopping-off place for people on their way to basic housing. What basic housing?

Toronto doesn’t even have affordable housing for women and children wanting to leave battered women’s shelters. Interval House is so named for that very reason. It’s intended to cover a relatively brief stay. But where can those families safely go?

Education is the worst sector for language that is incomprehensible to outsiders. But every group from drug gangs to police forces does this, making themselves into a club of secret names.

But you’re not in a gang, you’re merely trying to send your child to school. On the Toronto District School Board’s website, there are references to IPRC, SEPRC, RECE, EDP, FDK, FSL, EF, JEF, CCAT, CBRM, HSP, IEP, SST, BLV, IST, SST and the child hasn’t entered kindergarten yet.

Imagine how it difficult it must be for a new Canadian without a full command of English to talk to the school about mapping a toddler’s progress.

Dry language is invented to avoid causing offence, and that’s worthwhile. The United Way’s former “priority neighbourhoods” — poor areas that need money and attention — was changed to “neighbourhood improvement areas.”

Now one of its projects with York University is described this way: “the Building Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy focuses on a place-based approach to dealing with complex and often intersecting neighbourhood challenges within priority areas.”

Charitable groups bend over backwards to do their work gently and fairly. But it seems strange that we are unable to say the word “poor” out loud.

I am interested in Ontario’s experimental Basic Income Pilot, in which the working poor get a raise. Individuals are given $16,989 a year and couples $24,027, less 50 per cent of earned income. Poor people have a problem: they don’t have enough money. This so-called experiment solves their problem by giving them what they need, more money.

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It’s an eminent idea. I like it. Will poor people be more peaceful, productive and healthier with more money to spend? Something suggests to me that they will.

The only question is how to pay for it. That is the brick wall, which will be on display in Stakeholders’ Response Mechanisms to Altering Provincial Financial Burden Frameworks.

hmallick@thestar.ca