The Denver City Council this week unanimously approved a proposal to do away with the term “illegal alien” in the city charter, replacing it with the more ambiguous and clumsier, but politically acceptable, “worker without authorization.” The state did the same thing with a bill last session making the identical replacement in public service contracts. At the national level, the Biden administration has directed the relevant federal agencies to ditch “illegal alien” in favor of the somewhat oxymoronic “undocumented citizen”.

For those of you who thought that the grammatical laziness and insipid contractions which characterize modern “text language” were the catalyst of the breakdown of the English language – well, you’re right. But government offers some stiff competition.

The term “illegal alien” is out, we are told, because it carries a derogatory timbre. It is “dehumanizing,” we are informed, and “criminalizes individuals.” Well, to the extent that the term is used to describe someone whose presence in the United States is directly due to the commission of an illegal act, yes, I suppose it is, in the same sense that “speeder” may be used to describe someone who exceeded posted speed limits (disclosure: I have at times identified as a “speeder.” Mea Culpa.)

But the relevant questions are: a) is the term accurate? And b) is it useful? On the first point, there can be little question as to its accuracy. “Alien,” literally, means “foreign,” or “extrinsic”. I’m an alien, having been born and raised in Canada and retaining a passport from that country. Most of you reading this, I wager, if you were to visit my boyhood home, would be aliens. Had I not gone through the process (which certainly needs some reforms but remains the duly legal process) and came here to live anyway, I would be an “illegal alien.”

As for the usefulness of the term, that is a practical consideration. We need a way to distinguish, for a variety of reasons, those who are citizens and those who are not. We further need a way to distinguish between those non-citizens (us aliens) who are here legally, and those who are not. The English language has provided us with the words to accurately and concisely make those distinctions.

The term “alien,” granted, may in contemporary usage conjure images of little green men, or some other manifestation of other-worldly beings; but the accuracy of the term is not deflated by the fact that a growing majority of our elected officials have been more influenced by bad movies and b-grade documentaries on UFO sightings than by Jane Austen or John Keats.

The episode brings to mind all of the other ravages the language has endured over the past few decades of being tortured in the service of ideological conformity. The mad rush to purge any references to gender has amounted to a declaration of war on the synecdoche, to the point where improper usage is not only tolerated but expected; for instance it is now perfectly acceptable to change a sentence from “Anyone who wants to go to the game must bring his money tomorrow” to “Anyone who wants to go to the game must bring their money tomorrow.” I submit that anyone who writes a sentence like that should not be writing sentences for a living.

Language, one readily concedes, does evolve. Sometimes it is a practical matter – words to accurately describe space flight or computer technology simply did not exist at one time, and other words have become anachronistic – “dialing” a number, for example. And indeed, there is the law of said usage; how a word is popularly accepted dictates its usage – using “ideology” as a synonym for “philosophy” is a particular pet peeve of mine. There are considerations for advanced sensibilities as well; we no longer use certain words – “retarded”, for instance, to describe someone with intellectual disabilities – because their original meaning has been popularly twisted into the ugly and pejorative.

But is this the case with “illegal alien”? A schoolyard bully would likely use a far more hurtful, simple, and ignorant term than the somewhat polysyllabic and technical “illegal alien” if he (or she?) wishes to spew their venom.

The language vouchsafed us by King James was developed to be precise, while the language of ideology (using the word in its technically correct sense) relies on imprecision. Distinction in communication is a casualty of sloppy policy, but, as the antagonists in George Orwell’s most famous work might have said, those such as sit on the Denver City Council may see such indistinct homogeneity in speech as doubleplusgood.