On This July Fourth, Let’s Say Farewell to This Word

Now that the US government has done a word purge of “alien” from its immigration policy manual, replacing it with “noncitizen” and “undocumented individual,” it may be time to toss out its frequent companion as well.

Let’s say farewell to “foreign.”

“Foreign” stems from the Latin foris, meaning outside in the physical sense. A close etymological cousin is “forum,” originally a public place—i.e., outside.

So far, so good—and, you may be saying, so what? After all, dictionaries still start their list of meanings for “foreign” with such benign explanations as “situated outside a place or country.” This is the first definition in Merriam-Webster.

But keep going down the list and you’ll soon come to a very different meaning, of “alien in character: not connected or pertinent” (Merriam-Webster’s fourth entry). And there we are, back once again to “alien.”

Freighted and fraught

I vividly recall being described as a foreigner the year I lived in England. And yet, I didn’t feel like an alien, or that I was not pertinent. I just felt like an American who was in another country—not a foreign one, just a different one.

The problem with “foreign” is that it’s freighted. Fraught with negative connotations—stranger, outsider, unknown to the point of being suspect—it has a circle-the-wagons sentiment to it.

So why do we continue to call the familiar “foreign”? Our planet is a globalized, world society now, and in many ways has been for millennia. (In the year 1000, for example, there was a brisk Persian Gulf-China trade route that also connected to East Africa.)

Yet diplomats continue to engage in foreign relations, when the goal is to find connections with other countries. And would a foreign language be less intimidating to those of us who don’t know it if we thought of it as a world, or a global, or simply another language instead? Ditto for its native speakers.

Fight vs. facilitate

“Foreign” has its place, of course, as Veterans of Foreign Wars can attest. These soldiers were fighting enemies whose essential values threatened to undermine our own: that were alien to our national character. The debt we owe them is huge.

But when we don’t need to fight, let’s use words that facilitate tolerance rather than fight against it, however unconsciously. When we can swap “us-versus-them” language for words that instead suggest “we,” let’s do it. It’s just the kind of thing worth thinking about as we head outside to celebrate on this Fourth of July.                                                                     

Image by Tom Walsh, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons