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

What is this thing called ‘hug’?

 

(Wikimedia Commons photo by Todorov.petar.p)

Have you hugged…somebody today? (The expression began as “Have you hugged your kid today?” Now it’s gone so far as to ask, as an Etsy selection does, “Have you hugged your burrito unicorn?” Um, why?)

Thanks to a shot, or two, in the arm of a Covid-19 vaccine, many of us now feel safe using our arms to clasp, cradle and cuddle one another. No longer will expressions like “bear hug,” “bro hug” and “group hug” seem like quaint artifacts of a pre-pandemic world. Calendar note: January 21st is National Hugging Day; might as well start gearing up now.

Humans have been hugging since the 1560s—actually, far longer than that, but that’s when the meaning of wrapping your arms around someone became wrapped around the word hug. In Old Norse, people engaged in hugga, or comforting. The word evolved from hugr, which meant courage, and which is worth pondering. Old English weighed in with hogian, to care for.

The French, who like to linger over lunches and other pleasing things, stretched the pleasure of hug to the four-syllable embracier in Old French. Yes, that would be our modern “embrace.” The “brace” reaches back to the French, Latin and Greek words for arm, for the obvious reasons. Spanish makes it clear: el brazo is an arm; el abrazo is a hug.

“Hug” has its own brand of onomatopoeia. If you can sigh, you’re halfway to saying it.

And so we sigh—with relief, with unrestrained emotion, with no longer having to long to hug. We’re living high on the hug, and loving it.

 

                                             

‘Civil’ comes back in flower

Among its many other triumphs, Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem was a disarming, uplifting reminder that in our words lie powerful incubators of our deeds. One such word that her poem summoned for me was “civil.”

Some of the strongest buttresses of our democracy are bound up in that word. Civil discourse. Civil liberties. Civil society. Civil rights.

“Of or relating to citizens,” Merriam-Webster tells us about the word, presenting its first meaning. The Romans gave it to us in the form of civilis, deriving from civis, or citizen.

For the Romans, so strongly was the idea of civis connected to one’s identity that to utter Cicero’s pronouncement of Civis Romanus sum—“I am a Roman citizen”—was to immediately command respect. It’s no accident that some of this country’s foundations as a republic trace back to the ideas and ideals of Cicero. Even though not in Rome, Americans have been known to do as some of those ancient Romans did when it comes to government.

From civis to civilis is just a few short steps, as civilis speaks to public life and the civic order: both the rights and the duties of a citizenry. Walk with that concept a little farther and it’s not long before you arrive at the familiar, everyday meaning of civil: polite.

Civil discourse is how democracy works best because it means we listen, politely, before deciding a course of action. So to once again practice civility is more than a nice gesture, the kind thing to do. It’s also to be an American citizen. It’s our democratic way to both command respect, and show it.