What's your mental image of "the poor"?

Do you see stalwart men and women on low wages who work from dawn till dusk to scrape together enough to keep their families fed and to pay the bills?

Or is your image of “the poor” one of overweight young women, with a baby in a buggy, shopping in pyjamas, or families flopped in front of day-time television while the public purse picks up their rent? Do you find yourself donating to poor children in developing countries who are somehow worthy, while resenting those in harsh circumstances right here?

Poverty is no respecter of stereotypes, as many more of us may be about to find out. Those who suffer it should not be homogenised by lazy, stigmatising language, according to the respected Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The think-tank says the use of terms like “the poor” should be banned, as should “sink estate”. It claims they amount to discrimination akin to racism and sexism. They amount to “poverty-ism”. (Now that is a word I would ban.) But does it have a point?

The language we use to describe people and situations has a bearing on how they are viewed and valued. Instead of “the poor” what about using “people in poverty”? It gets across the accurate message that those who slip into poverty are in a temporary economic state and will hopefully emerge from it.

“The poor” makes people feel they are outside society; and society begins to view them as a permanent group that is a drag of resources. So a difficult economic situation becomes stigmatised.

Another criticism of the term is that the people it is trying to describe do not necessarily see themselves as disadvantaged. I worked with a charity that ran focus groups with young people across Scotland. It was a heartening experience not least because teenagers in the most deprived areas said their ambition was to help the underprivileged. They didn’t apply the term to themselves.

The same applies at the other end of the scale. I have yet to meet anyone who describes themselves as rich. I once interviewed a man worth around £6million who was still intent on money-making schemes. He wasn’t rich, he insisted. No, if I wanted to meet someone who was rich I should talk to an acquaintance of his who was worth £20m.

So everything is relative, which is part of the difficulty. Poverty as it was measured before the welfare state is still experienced in Britain by one to two million people. They struggle to feed and clothe themselves. But a fifth of the population qualify as poor on because they earn less than 60% of the average wage. By the very nature of this measure the poor will – as the saying goes– always be with us.

Anyone with an income under £14,000 a year is in relative poverty. According to the Prudential, more than a third of the people who retire this year will qualify. Within that group 26% of the women and 12% of the men will have less than £10,000 a year to live on. That constitutes dire poverty. Why not then call them “the poor”?

The trouble with the term is that it makes those in poverty seem like group distinct from the rest of society. They are “them” and the rest are “us”. We are always sensitive to our own wants and needs and rights. We’re less careful about “theirs”.

Here’s an example. Don’t we all know that the Nepalese men and women who carry huge loads from their villages to base camp for climbers are tough and resilient? A mountaineer told me he had taken this stereotype for granted until one day he came to his senses and realised the Nepalese were just like him and his. They found the strength to carry monstrous loads up narrow mountain tracks because they needed the wages to feed their families.

They became individuals.

That’s the warning the think tank has issued. The population which lives below 60% of average income is a shifting one comprised of individuals. People move into and out of poverty, sometimes seasonally. Winter heating plus Christmas can tip someone below the bar but they may rise above it again by spring.

It’s a topical subject when many people sitting in comfortable homes with a car at the door also have a wallet full of maxed-out credit cards and a mortgage that keeps them sleepless. They’re probably one salary – two at the most – from joining “the poor”.

If that happens, will the terminology used to describe their circumstances matter to them? Will they feel stigmatised, as a spokesman for Rowntree suggests? I bet they will prefer to be “people in poverty” not “the poor”.

Is a rat catcher happier being called a pest control officer? Is being visually impaired an improvement on blind? I think so. Both are more accurate.

I don’t know if the term gay caused the shrivelling of prejudice against homosexuals or simply reflected it but going back to the pejorative “queer” is unimaginable.

By contrast we have largely replaced fat with obese. Fat could be jolly but obesity is clearly viewed as a social crime. It’s a short step from there to prejudice.

But surely any shame attached to poverty should have been swept away with the Victorian era? Look at a few episodes of Who Do You Think You Are or read the biographies of the greats. Few make it from cradle to grave without a brush with poverty.

In the 1970s and 1980s the poor were mostly pensioners and lone parents. In the 1990s it was families with children. If Mervyn King and George Osborne fail to pull the rescue rabbit out of the hat, the poor of the 2010s could be you, me, any or all of us.

Living in poverty will be hard enough without being branded by it as well.