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category: Steve's Musings

Lundy: Plain language Comments

A couple weeks ago, I wrote the final chapter — for a while, anyway — of one of the saddest stories I’ve ever followed in 25 years in the newspaper business: The killing of a 2-year-old boy.

That chapter dealt with the defendant avoiding an aggravated murder trial by pleading guilty instead to first-degree manslaughter and accepting a 20-year prison sentence.

As you’d read in the story if you clicked on the link above, the killer is a Mexican national who entered the U.S. without proper paperwork. Thus did I naturally refer to him as an illegal alien, without giving much thought to the word choice.

I mean, what thought was there to give? The man is a citizen of another country living in our country without USCIS documentation.

But on Monday, I received a sort of interesting email from a Bozeman, Mont., resident named Paul Nachman. Here it is:

Dear Mr. Lundeberg,

In your article about the sentencing in the case of the “manslaughtered” two-year old, you wrote, “Dios Tomas, a 28-year-old Mexican national and an illegal alien, remained lodged at the county jail this morning.”  That wouldn’t be notable except that it provides a counterexample for the huge propensity in the American press to employ euphemisms in place of the legally and technically accurate term “illegal alien.”  So, thank you for doing the straightforward, honest thing!

This ongoing conflict over language was the subject of an article just two days ago in the San Bernardino Sun.  The reporter there covered the subject pretty well.  And I’ve submitted the following letter to the Sun in hopes of injecting a couple of other pertinent facts:

Editor:

Regarding the controversy over the word “alien,” it’s worth pointing out that in Congressmen Gutierrez’s and Ortiz’s bill H.R.4321 for the mass amnesty of illegal aliens, “alien” and its variants “aliens” and “alienage” appear 650 times, altogether.  It’s easy to verify this by copying the text from the PDF version of the bill and pasting it into a Word document, then doing a “find and replace” on “alien.”  When finished, Word displays the count.

Further, Cal State San Bernardino professor Elsa Valdez complains that “illegal alien” conjures up images of people who are criminals.  Well, you can be incarcerated for it (see U.S. Code, Title 8, Section 1325a).  So it’s a crime, and people who commit crimes are criminals!

I wrote back to Mr. Nachman, thanking him for taking the time to read and to write and explaining, as I said earlier, that using the term “illegal alien” required no extensive decision-making process in this case.

Just trying to be accurate and truthful, as always.

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