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

A Smart-Words Manifesto

The trend is encouraging: there are Smart Cars, smart buildings, even smart cows (or at least, Smart Balance margarine and Simply Smart milk). We’re shown how to be smart about money, perhaps because more of us have less of it thanks to the price of that margarine and milk.

Isn’t it time we started being smart about our words?

In one sense, we already are. English is a finicky language, filled with rules and exceptions to them. And, just to keep us on our linguistic toes, it’s rarely met a language it didn’t like and want to borrow from.

Thus we have words from Sanskrit (juggernaut) and Algonquin (mugwump) and French (dishabille) and Spanish (aficionado) and Latin (caveat) and Greek (hubris) and German (Schadenfreude) and plenty more.

The number of words in the English language hovers at around a quarter of a million, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (which Ammon Shea, a fellow word-lover, recently read in its entirety). Only the number of guys who’ve wished they were Tiger Woods surpasses this.

Certainly, English is one of the most…verbose of the world languages. The fact that most of us who speak the language can string together coherent sentences says much about our smarts.

Isn’t it time we showed the world our smarter selves? Why not use more of this vast wealth of words at our fingertips?

It doesn’t always have to be about the big, Bill Buckley words. It’s really about using the right words—the ones that send a little frisson of pleasure down the spine when you hear them or read them or write them. (Really, words can do that.)

As a nation, we’ve been Dummied down too long. The assumption seems to have been that because we don’t know something—how to say eleemosynary, for example—we can’t learn. Nonsense.

Americans have been smart enough to figure how to keep a democracy relatively intact for more than 200 years. (Winston Churchill once described democracy as “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” and then used his mastery of the language to help protect it from ruin.) If we can do that, surely we can figure out how to put more words to work for us.

Once upon a time America had eloquent leaders—Kennedy, Lincoln, John Adams and just about everyone in his crowd. Perhaps we will again. Eloquence has a way of uplifting, of bringing out “the better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln said—even if it means bringing out, or clicking onto, the dictionary.

We Americans don’t need to be talked down to. We’re smarter than that. It’s about time we showed this better angel of our nature to the world, and to ourselves.

(About eleemosynary—it’s a long way of saying “depending on charity” and is pronounced ell-ee-uh-MAH-sin-ar-ee.)

And what do you think, oh smart one reading this—do you agree? I’d love to hear from you. Please post your Comment…and let’s have words.