John McWhorter doubts that replacing the term “illegal immigrant” with “undocumented immigrant” will “improve the public opinion of the people in question”:
The problem is that language dances much more lightly on thought than we often suppose, and in a battle between thought and language, thought has a way of winning out. Words’ meanings, even when crafted to bend away from opinion, drift back to where we didn’t want them to be, like a fly keeps landing on you after you swat it away. This has happened to previous attempts to expunge a term of its negative meaning.
Consider affirmative action, now so conventional we rarely stop to parse what the actual words comprising it mean. “Affirming” what? What kind of “action”? The term was a magnificently artful and gracious construction of the 1960s, giving a constructive, positive air to an always controversial policy.
McWhorter makes related points elsewhere:
Decrying the designation of the people as illegal is like trying to put out a housefire with an eyedropper: language’s record on seriously transforming thought is scanty indeed. Many will recall UC Berkeley’s George Lakoff suggesting back in the Bush era that we call taxes “membership fees.” Clever—but how many think the current impasse between Democrats and Republicans over tax hikes would be any less intransigent today if the President were engaging John Boehner in a debate over membership fees?
The Dish 