The AP decrees no more “illegal aliens.”

When plain words lose their meaning

Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words.

WITH YOUR permission, Dear Reader, allow us to indulge in a little shoptalk: It seems the Associated Press puts out a stylebook every so often to keep us working stiffs in line. You go to seminary, you see kids carrying around Bibles. You go to an SEC school, you see athletes carrying around playbooks. You go to a J-school, and the kids are carrying around the AP Stylebook. And, yes, it capitalizes Stylebook.

The book is a kind of dictionary, if only because the entries are listed alphabetically. And it tells a young journalist—or even a veteran one—how to spell the capitals of other countries, when to use knockout as one word or two, and why it’s called a Canada goose, rookie, not a Canadian one.

Not that we always follow the AP stylebook— or anybody else’s—here on the editorial page. Why, lookie there, we just lowercased stylebook itself. Sorry about that, AP. It’s a free country, and it even has a First Amendment about freedom of the press.

The editors that be at the Associated Press made news themselves last week when they announced that their stylebook would no longer approve the use of Illegal Immigrant to describe illegal immigrants. Down the memory hole it must go. It makes the folks at AP feel double plus ungood when they see badspeak.

Speaking of Orwell, he could have written the line used by Kathleen Carroll of the AP, who made the announcement of the change with this claim and advertisement: “Our goal always is to use the most precise and accurate words so that the meaning is clear to any reader anywhere.” The Ministry of Truth couldn’t have said it better than Miss Kathleen. Or worse.

Ah, yes, to be precise and accurate. A laudatory aim. And to achieve that ambitious goal, the AP has decided to nix the most precise and accurate words to describe illegal immigrants, which is to say, illegal and immigrants. Hey, it’s just words, right? Big Brother would understand.

Also, Miss Kathleen probably wouldn’t approve of that honorific or the use of her first name in conjunction with it. What we in these latitudes might consider courtesy, or a friendly usage, even a chivalrous gesture, might not come up to her standards, which produced this prize example of newspeak: “The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that ‘illegal’ should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.” The way illegal immigrants do? Somebody—it may have been us— once said that language was the Little Roundtop of any political argument, that is, the decisive ground. Whoever occupies it may hold an unassailable position, or at least shouldn’t give it up without one heckuva fight. (See Gettysburg, 1863.) This current debate over words, namely two of them, illegal and immigrant, is too important to cede to the other side. Words deserve respect, even reverence. When we allow them to be devalued, the whole language is cheapened, and thought itself coarsened.

THE Associated Press says it made this change after discussions on the topic that included People From Many Walks of Life. Which is to say, a committee. Ah, committees. Which are now inevitably called Task Forces. They’re where bad ideas spring up like mushrooms after a spring rain. And good ideas go to die. Why? Because no one person alone would want to make a decision to change the clear meaning of the wonderful, descriptive and, on occasion, precise English language. So let a committee do it. That way, the crime can be laid to a safely anonymous entity known as People From Many Walks of Life.

We’ve long suspected that newspaper editors invented editorial boards to approve, condemn or just generally mess around with editorial ideas so they won’t have to bear responsibility for them alone. When many people are responsible for some atrocious decision, then nobody is. The very phrase, People From Many Walks of Life, is prima facie evidence that somebody doesn’t want to take the fall alone.

So what would the AP have the nation’s newspapers use instead of “illegal immigrants” to describe illegal immigrants? On that point, these keepers of journalistic nomenclature aren’t as clear. Indeed, they’re downright muddy, as those intent on avoiding the simple meaning of words tend to be. They seem to think vagueness a safe refuge rather than the tacit confession it is.

According to the Washington Post, the AP wants newspapers to “specify wherever possible how someone entered the country illegally and from where. Crossed the border? Overstayed a visa? What nationality?” (Goodness, by the time all those details are listed, the story may have to be continued on an inside page. If the paper hasn’t already gone to press by then.)

Somebody from NPR, which can always be counted on to help whenever the object is to blur the language, said the correct phrase should be Unauthorized Migrants, which doesn’t sound like much of an improvement.

Time magazine quoted an official at AP who said the term Foreigners in the United States in Violation of the Law could also be used. Time, whose specialty once upon a distant time was the concise if opinionated presentation of the news, now seems bent on racking up excess verbiage. Foreigners in the United States in Violation of the Law, indeed. We think Time means illegal immigrants.

THERE are people on both sides of this debate who honestly empathize with folks who don’t have their papers in order. We daresay we ourselves would be sorely tempted to wade across the Rio Grande if there were no other way to get to this promised land. Folks who have no proof they belong here must live in fear much of the time—not only fear of the INS but of the local thugs who make a practice of taking advantage of them. But immigration—legal, illegal or in-between—is going to happen here as long as Lady Liberty lifts her lamp beside the golden door. And this country has work to offer, not to mention a continent-long border with a Third World country.

Something has to change. The border must be secured. Laws must be followed. La ley es la ley. The law is the law. But not even the most hardened nativist would be able to round up 12 million people and deport ’em all.

What to do? Believe it or not, it looks as though Washington is getting closer and closer to a solution to this problem. The papers these days are full of rumors about bipartisan agreement and negotiated compromise. Plans have been floated to make illegal immigrants legal—although not citizens till a decent period of time has passed. (None dare call it Amnesty.) It begins to seem possible that the folks in Washington who are supposed to work these things out may actually work this one out. It would be a nice change. It’s time we stopped fighting this problem, as much fun as it’s been, and just solved it.

But the country is going to have a hard time solving the problem of illegal immigrants, or any other, if we’ve lost the language. And when an outfit that’s supposed to guard the language, or at least the form of it used in the low but necessary trade called journalism, abandons it in favor of verbal fog, then somebody somewhere has to stand up and declare: Speak plain!