An African migrant holds a placard depicting the signing of a United Nations convention pertaining to the status of refugees in 1951, as her child and husband stand nearby during a protest in front of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees office in Tel Aviv.
The adage "sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” never quite rang true to me.
And in the wake of the migrant crisis, it rings even more false. The words are being used interchangeably these days — but they mean vastly different things.
New York Times reporter Somini Sengupta recently highlighted that fact when she explained how being defined as one or another matters in the eyes of the law.
And that got English professor Bill Germano thinking about the actual etymology of the words. He wrote about the words for Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog.
“It turns out that refugee and migrant first make their appearances in English within a year of each other in 1681 and 1682,” says Germano.
The word refugee comes from French and was first used in the modern context following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which sent the Protestant Huguenots to flee the religious persecution by the French King Louis XIV.
“This was now a group of people who were leaving France and became identified as refugees," Germano says. "With that, the word began its progress into the English language."
The term morphed by the 18th century, according to Germano, to encompass more than just people fleeing religious persecution to people fleeing war, violence and other persecution.
One of the earliest reported uses of the word migrant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, says Germano, came from one of his favorite writers, Sir Thomas Browne’s book Letter to a Friend in 1672.
“He comes up with this term, but he’s talking about the movement of animals,” says Germano. “Birds in particular are described from the 1670s on as migrants. We might say migratory now, but migrant is the first use of the word.”
By the 18th century, says Germano, migrant became a term that was used much more broadly — for humans as well as animals. There are three key moments when these words are particularly active and interesting after their first emergence, according to Germano.
“One is around the French Revolution. We get a lot of these words because of the movement of large groups of people because of the French Revolution. The American Colonies and the early republic for words like emigrant and immigrant [as well]. And then World War II, which is profoundly important even only at the level of language, for helping to define what a displaced person is and then, in 1951 of course, when the resolution is passed, which helps us define what these terms legally are going to be,” says Germano.
One of the things that has always interested Germano is the layers of language history.
“As we use these terms, particularly now in this highly charged political environment, I think it's really interesting and very, very useful for us to look back at the history because the meaning don’t go entirely away. Words have consequences,” says Germano.