Friday, August 24, 2007

Legal citizen?

Emphasis is mine.

“Alderman Michael Madsen, D-Ward 9, said he would not vote in favor of the (Rural Ulster Preservation Co.) grant application unless the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service provides him with confirmation that all workers at the site (the Kirkland Hotel) are legal U.S. citizens.”

I’m not going to talk about discrimination here (after all, there are labor laws – if you have working papers, you cannot discriminate based on race, gender, religious preference, country of origin, etc).

What I really want to talk about in this space is language, mainly redundancies.

At this point in time, you have to ask a question:

What is the alderman talking about? Because what, then, is an illegal citizen?

It is absolutely necessary to point out that maybe Madsen misspoke those words since all citizens are, well, legal, even when they break the law. I just don’t think he has an answer that would be an unexpected surprise or that he’s under any false illusion about the topic.

We also cannot circle around the true fact I am not an academic scholar or a politician – so the terminology he used might have been deliberate. You may call it an unsolved mystery.

But the basic fundamentals of this story have to be completely told in its entirety, or you might not know what I am talking about, either.

So advance forward and click on the link. It’ll only take you a brief moment to read the piece.

As an added bonus, I’ll give you this tiny bit: the Kirkland story gets an update on Saturday.

And without a single redundancy.