Quick vocabulary quiz. A "ban" is a closed door: it keeps people from getting something. An "eviction" is an open door, in the bad way: it takes something people already have. These are not the same word, because they are not the same thing happening to a family. * The policy in question: Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives pledged Thursday that foreign nationals would be stripped of their existing social housing tenancies — the plan, per its own advertising, covers some 230,000 households, with tenants given six months to vacate so the homes can go to families on the waiting list. Badenoch's sales pitch: Britain must stop being a "cash machine for the world." * Now the headlines. The BBC: "Conservatives pledge to ban foreign nationals from social housing." The Guardian: "Tory plan to ban foreign nationals from social housing condemned as 'divisive.'" Both chose "ban" — the closed-door word, the prospective word, the word that quietly suggests this is about future applicants filling in future forms. Nothing in the word "ban" tells you that a family currently living in a council flat gets a letter and a six-month countdown. * And then there's the Mirror: "Tory plans to evict foreign nationals from social housing would leave 'families at risk of homelessness.'" Evict. The tabloid found the accurate verb. We'd like to frame this moment: the paper with the horoscopes and the football gossip described a mass tenancy-revocation policy more precisely than the public broadcaster with the style guide the length of a novel. * Does the verb matter? It's the whole ballgame. Polling on "should new arrivals get priority for social housing" and polling on "should settled families be removed from their homes" produce very different numbers, and every politician knows it. A headline that says "ban" tests the popular version of the policy. A headline that says "evict" tests the actual one. * To be fair to everyone's paragraph nines: the BBC's article does explain the tenancy-stripping, and the Guardian's gets to Labour calling the plan an "unserious, unworkable proposal, copied from Reform." The details exist. But headlines are what most people read, and the housing charity Crisis added the detail that deserves a headline of its own — in its chief executive's words, "Most foreign nationals simply cannot access social housing" already. So the closed door was mostly closed to begin with; what's new is the removals. Which is exactly what "ban" doesn't say.