The words strong and powerful are pretty much synonymous, right? I could quite reasonably say that 6ft 9in, 19-stone Springbok rugby player Lood de Jager is a powerful man. Or that he is a strong man. Bung strong into Google and ask it to spew out a synonym: powerful comes first. The reverse is also true. The two words are more or less interchangeable, agreed?

Well, not always. An example: as I type this piece, I can say that I’m drinking strong coffee and sitting at a powerful computer. But although strong and powerful are evidently very similar words, there’s something not quite right if I swap the adjectives – “I’m drinking powerful coffee and sitting at a strong computer.” You’d get my meaning, but it would jar.

This example illustrates the phenomenon of collocations in our language, which basically means that certain words just go. They tessellate. They interdigitate. Like harmonic notes and complementary colours and best friends at school, certain words sit nicely together. Coffee with strong; computer with powerful.

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly why collocations develop but, like many cultural mores, it’s obvious when the rules are broken. You can kill time, but you can’t murder it. You go by car or by train, but on foot. You can take or have a look at something, but you can’t make a look at something.

Some words are bound even more tightly, so closely yoked together that they only come out to play in the presence of one another. The word kith is never seen anywhere except in the company of kin, as in the phrase “kith and kin” (a rather old-fashioned way of referring to your relatives). Kith is so dependent on kin that it simply won’t appear without it.

I think it’s important that we all appreciate the power of collocations. Because when we begin to read or hear certain words, our brains begin a process of word association. We automatically think of which words go together. A synapse fires and looks for another it is familiar with. We brain-google a word and our mental search engine begins to autocomplete the phrase. Strong goes with coffee. Powerful goes with computer.

Which brings us to the use of the word migrant to describe the thousands of people desperately trying to get across the Mediterranean to escape war and destitution in their home countries. Theresa May, the home secretary, is clearly very fond of the word. It appeared in the deal she signed with her French counterpart setting out to “provide migrants with a more dissuasive and realistic sense of life for illegal migrants in the United Kingdom”. She used it liberally in her xenophobic speech to the Conservative conference this week, promising tougher laws to distinguish between “economic migrants” and “genuine refugees”.

Many in the media are now quite rightly avoiding using migrant in this context – it is dehumanising and, as Barry Malone of Al Jazeera says, “strips suffering people of their voice”. But unfortunately, the person with the most power to help these people, who most shapes the debate and whom the media most readily quote when covering the topic, still uses the word far too frequently.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theresa May: wants our compassion to dwindle. Photograph: Julien Warnand/EPA

When we hear May (or anyone else for that matter) using the word migrant we need to heed the power of collocations. Thanks to years of fear-mongering by rightwing press and politicians, I’d argue that both migrant and immigrant have become deleteriously collocalised with another word – illegal.

For evidence, I could point to almost any newspaper article on immigration in the noughties and a great many since. I also proffer two supporting exhibits:



• My girlfriend is a speech and language therapist who regularly plays word association games with children to assess their communication difficulties. Just last week she asked a young child what they thought of first when given the word “illegal”. Despite having delayed linguistic development, the child immediately responded “immigrant”.

• Try typing “illegal” into Google. What comes up on the list of autocompleted suggested searches? I’d wager that for most people (Google’s autocorrect function is tailored to your search history and preferences) the word “immigrant” or “immigration” would pop up.

Encouragingly, there’s been some movement to stop using the phrase “illegal immigrant”. The Associated Press and NBC have banned the term. Journalists at the New Yorker and the Guardian avoid it wherever possible. This isn’t overreach of “political correctness”. Telling someone who is running for their life that they are an illegal immigrant is a profoundly harmful and reductive epithet that ignores their plight.

But collocalisations are so powerful that even though the words immigrant or migrant are less frequently prefixed by the word illegal (at least in the more liberal quarters of the media), some of the afterscent of illegal is still whiffed whenever the words immigrant or migrant are breathed out. Our brains see or hear “immigrant/migrant” and autocomplete it to “illegal immigrant/migrant”.

Because they have been sitting together so long, the essential meaning of the words immigrant and migrant have been warped – they’re now branded with illegality, forever altered, never innocent again. (I’d also argue that the word benefits has been similarly tarnished by collocalisation with the word cheat.) And, clearly, the concept of illegality conjures up images of wickedness, of wrongdoing, of a threat to our safety and livelihoods.

This is exactly the mental picture that May tries to evoke. She knows that when we hear immigrant or migrant we can’t help but think – at least on some subconscious level – of foul play. She wants us to use this impulse to cloud our thinking and make us ignore the pictures of suffering we see every day. She wants our hearts to harden and our compassion to dwindle. We must resist such devious wordplay.

