– Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass (1871)
Naturalisation
is the process by which a foreigner obtains a passport issued by his country of residence. It shows that people who live in the country where they were born consider anyone else “unnatural” if they choose to live in any other country.
Home
is the address where you yourself feel you belong, the place to which you come after each day’s work, and the dwelling where you normally hang up your clothes at night. You may have been born there, but you are more likely to have moved in after you married and had children. It is the place you have chosen not to leave.
If you are a child or a cat, then you certainly did not choose your home, but, unless you are an orphan, this does not imply that you would choose to leave if you could do so.
If you go away to study, or get a job in another town or another country, or marry a man who beats you, then it is not unnatural for you to refer to the place where your parents live as “home”. But once you start living together with a partner, get a kitten, and sign up for TV and internet, then it is time to refer to the address where you are living as “home”.
A lot of people choose to make their home in a different country from the country in which they were born. Nevertheless, both the EU and the public authorities of that country use the phrase “home country” to identify, not the country in which a person in this situation has made his or her home, but the country in which they were born or the country that issued their passport. This ambiguous abuse of a precise everyday word is perpetrated by serious news media, who are supposed to be guardians of the language, as well as by politicians of all parties and by the general public. The abuse is also universal in Danish, so it is presumably normal in many other languages too. The absence of a succinct term for “country of origin” demonstrates a poverty of thought on the part of the majority. It is if they are trying to signal that each one of the large minority of persons who choose to live in a different country must in some way be “unnatural”. Endorsing this extreme point of view is particularly hypocritical of the EU, which claims that the free mobility of persons between member states is its policy.
Send home
is the double euphemism that border officials, politicians of all affiliations, journalists and the general public misuse to describe the deportation of migrants who cannot obtain a valid residence permit, or refugees whose application for asylum has been rejected. These are nevertheless people who have chosen to make their home in the country that is rejecting them. They do not usually have a home in the country they have left, either because they have given it up, sold it, or been forced out by hostilities or ethnic cleansing. Using the word “home” to identify the country they have left is both an abuse of the language and also a violation of the right of everyone to be treated in accordance with their true identity.
The word “send” is neutral in its connotations. Sending a package does not imply that you either approve or disapprove of its contents. Sending a mechanic to repair a machine does not imply antipathy towards either the mechanic or the machine. Sending the children or the staff home because of e.g. a health hazard discovered in the premises shows concern for their wellbeing. Being deported, however, is a very distressing experience, and is usually a brutal intrusion on the personal freedom of the person deported. It is a kind of rape, and the person may never get over it.
The use of a doubly euphemistic phrase for a brutal deportation order instead of an expression that conveys the unpleasantness of the action is manipulative. The authorities’ motive for doing this is presumably to divert the public away from taking moral responsibility for the actions of their government. In the UK, the government department responsible for “sending home” deportees is called the Home Office.
Citizenship
A citizen is a person who lives in a city, though the ‘z’ seems to be an etymological illegal immigrant. The word has come to characterise anyone with a registered address in the city, in contrast to a temporary visitor or a vagrant of no fixed address. Nothing about the usage implies that a citizen was born in the city, and a citizen of one of the large conurbations is more likely than not to have been born somewhere else.
If you didn’t know better, you might expect that a “British citizen” (or a “dansk statsborger”) would be a person with an address in a British (or a Danish) city, regardless of where in the world he or she was born. However, in the world of Humpty Dumpty, the word “citizenship” (“statsborgerskab” in Danish) is to be used as if it were synonymous wth “nationality”. This deprives the vocabulary of any neutral word to categorise, e.g., a British national living in a Danish city. What is the motive for impoverishing language in this way? Presumably it is to reinforce the illusion that all nations are homogeneous, i.e., that all the inhabitants of each state were born there, and to make it difficult to mention foreigners.
This is hardly a secret, and legislators must be well aware that the most important and widespread function of a marriage licence (especially for same-sex couples) is to facilitate the migration, not only of unpopular immigrant groups, but also of desirable experts, executives and middle-class consumers whom businessmen consider essential to their profits. The general public, however, retains a gooey-eyed romantic perception of the purpose of marriage that bears no relation to the obvious facts. Deceitful civil servants and news editors have agreed on the offensive phrase “sham marriage” for a marriage whose only purpose is to obtain a legitimate residence permit for one of the partners. Society is in effect asserting the right to compel certain couples to live in the same accommodation and have non-consensual sex, commonly referred to as “rape”.
It also follows that a large proportion of the marriages actually contracted have been forced upon couples who would have cohabited if it weren’t for the immigration laws. This situation makes border agencies into far greater perpetrators of “forced marriage” than parents who “arrange” marriages for their children. This is no mere technicality, because it seriously skews the divorce statistics. A cohabiting couple who separate do not need to apply for a divorce. The lawyers, demographers and journalists who interpret these statistics, however, are systematic in their disregard of the large contribution that the immigration laws make to the divorce rate.
It was not until about the time of the French Revolution that Protestant societies spread the conviction that literacy ought to be universal. As with all other bandwagons, it subsequently became impossible to discuss whether this development really was as beneficial as those who earn their living by teaching and printing books and periodicals have always insisted it was. Be that as it may, no one has invented special words for people who lack other abilities, e.g., to compose pop hits or to repair a bicycle. Those who consider themselves empathetic would do well to stop designating pupils as "dyslexic" and focus instead on commending those who have acquired any skills.
Society as a whole should accept the importance of biodiversity by, amongst other things, not endorsing measures to steamroller individuals into conforming to what is, in this instance, an extreme position.
Sham marriage and forced marriage
It can hardly have escaped anyone’s notice that men and women can live together and raise children without incurring any significant social, economic or legal impediments resulting from the absence of a marriage licence. Furthermore, the tax or social security rules may actually impose an economic penalty on couples who do marry instead of cohabiting. On the other hand, it has evidently escaped nearly everyone’s notice that a marriage licence is frequently necessary if one or each of the partners has a foreign passport. This is because, in general, every national state (industrialised or not) requires any foreigner (whether from the EU or not) intending to live there to have an income that exceeds the social security entitlement of its own nationals. This condition is most commonly fulfilled by marriage to a spouse who earns enough to support all members of the legally recognised family.This is hardly a secret, and legislators must be well aware that the most important and widespread function of a marriage licence (especially for same-sex couples) is to facilitate the migration, not only of unpopular immigrant groups, but also of desirable experts, executives and middle-class consumers whom businessmen consider essential to their profits. The general public, however, retains a gooey-eyed romantic perception of the purpose of marriage that bears no relation to the obvious facts. Deceitful civil servants and news editors have agreed on the offensive phrase “sham marriage” for a marriage whose only purpose is to obtain a legitimate residence permit for one of the partners. Society is in effect asserting the right to compel certain couples to live in the same accommodation and have non-consensual sex, commonly referred to as “rape”.
It also follows that a large proportion of the marriages actually contracted have been forced upon couples who would have cohabited if it weren’t for the immigration laws. This situation makes border agencies into far greater perpetrators of “forced marriage” than parents who “arrange” marriages for their children. This is no mere technicality, because it seriously skews the divorce statistics. A cohabiting couple who separate do not need to apply for a divorce. The lawyers, demographers and journalists who interpret these statistics, however, are systematic in their disregard of the large contribution that the immigration laws make to the divorce rate.
Dyslexia
also known as “word-blindness”, is a “condition” that people with limited reading and/or writing abilities with which are commonly “diagnosed”, both by professionals and by the general public. This usage is both offensive and nonsense. Unlike eating, walking, talking and mating, reading and writing are not native skills. They were invented at least 5,000 years ago, and their use was confined to trained professionals until relatively recently. Many well known historical persons were definitely or probably illiterate.It was not until about the time of the French Revolution that Protestant societies spread the conviction that literacy ought to be universal. As with all other bandwagons, it subsequently became impossible to discuss whether this development really was as beneficial as those who earn their living by teaching and printing books and periodicals have always insisted it was. Be that as it may, no one has invented special words for people who lack other abilities, e.g., to compose pop hits or to repair a bicycle. Those who consider themselves empathetic would do well to stop designating pupils as "dyslexic" and focus instead on commending those who have acquired any skills.
Society as a whole should accept the importance of biodiversity by, amongst other things, not endorsing measures to steamroller individuals into conforming to what is, in this instance, an extreme position.
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