Bringing Back Home the Definition of a Residence

What it takes to make a house a home is a question of interest not only to real estate agents and owners, evidently, but also to furniture salesmen.

Ted Lepon sends me a tear sheet from Furniture/Today, a trade magazine whose existence I was not aware of, containing an essay by Carole Sloan called “Language Problems Come Home.”

Ms. Sloan notes that “focus group sessions” held recently by the Home Furnishings Council produced some eye-opening findings about the uses and misuses of the language in their business.

“It could well be,” she says, “that we have been speaking Swahili or Chinese to our furniture and home furnishings customers in this country.”

Curiously, it turned out that the question of whether one’s place of residence is a house or a home is divided along sex lines. “In several men-only focus groups,” she discloses, “the men referred to the places they lived in as ‘houses.’ Significantly different, the women-only focus groups discussed their residences as ‘homes.’ ”

In my recent discussion of these two words I noted that, according to the dictionary and to my understanding of them, a house is an unoccupied dwelling place, a fabrication of sticks and stones; a home is such a dwelling that is occupied, usually by a family, and is full of love, sex, strife, harmony, discord, usually children and sometimes pain.

I did not suggest that men did not honor this difference as often as women, not knowing it. My complaint was only that real estate agents, both men and women, seem to describe their listings as “homes,” probably because they sense that the word has more warmth and appeal than “houses.”

I am unable to verify Ms. Sloan’s findings that furniture men speak even of the houses they live in as houses, while women in the business speak of them as homes.

However, this does seem to bear out the old sexist cliches: that women are more oriented to the home, more concerned with family values and relationships; that they feel closer to the home than men.

I suppose this suggestion will bring both the feminists and the masculinists (is there such a word?) down on me for sexism. However, I am, after all, merely passing along the findings of Ms. Sloan at one of her industry’s conferences.

By the way, in recent years I have been chastised by one or another of the various men’s groups that have sprung up to defend men against their slander by militant feminists, and, of course, columnists. I used to think that it was all right to bad-mouth men because they wouldn’t fight back and because it would tend to mollify my feminist critics.

That is no longer true: A sexist remark about men is likely to bring a wrathful rebuke from one of their spokesmen; and the feminists too have eased up on the “male chauvinist pig” approach. Most of them realize, in the immortal words of Edgar A. Guest, that “it takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a house a home.”

Ms. Sloan grants that her sample is not enough to be conclusive, but she points out that “just the fact that two such disparate words are used to describe the same thing is cause for concern.”

But my point is that house and home are not the same thing. Both are dwellings, but until a house is dwelt in, it is not a home. But when it is dwelt in, evidently, men continue to think of it as a house, while to women it is a home.

Refining the point in reference to her own industry, Ms. Sloan found that men tended to think of decorating and furnishing in terms of wall paint and “things . . . outside of the house/home; while women thought of wallpaper and interior decorations.”

“Depending on your point of view,” she says, “we’re either talking the same language or different languages to about half our potential audience. And we’re not even talking about the ‘P’ word--’Price.’ This is a problem of magnificent proportions!”

Obviously real estate agents know that women make the decisions when it comes to buying a house. That’s why they advertise it as a home.

That’s why my wife wants to remodel. She considers our house a home.

I don’t care whether she paints or wallpapers. What worries me is the “P” word.