When you “migrate,” you’re moving from one place to another. If you do that, you might be called a “migrant.” On the other hand, geese migrate annually, but I’ve never heard of “migrant geese.” If you migrate in order to go where a particular kind of job is to be found, you might be called a “migrant worker,” but it depends on the kind of job it is. If you pick fruit or vegetables, “migrant worker” is likely to be applied to you. But if you travel to where a ship might be located, and get a job on that ship, thus traveling constantly, well, nobody thinks to call you a “migrant worker.” Similarly, if you’re elected to the US Congress, the typical pattern is that you migrate to Washington D.C. to do your job, but only for part of the year. For the rest, you migrate back to where you came from. “Migrant worker?” Well, yes, but at the same time no.
There’s other sorts of migrations, of course. Data stored in one database or computer is often “migrated” to a new one when it’s time for an upgrade. Nothing is physically moving in that situation, but it does represent a change in form or condition, so that’s another meaning of “migrate.” “Migration” is applied to plants as well, but in the sense that they become more widely distributed rather than (for the most part) individual plants moving. This sense was used as early as 1859 in Darwin’s Origin of Species: “As the plants … migrated southward, they will have become mingled…with the native American productions.” “Migration” is used in chemistry and biology to indicate a directional change in a process such as electrolysis: “Had no silver ions migrated from the anode, the rise in concentration would have been 32·2.” (“Introduction to Physical Chemistry” by James Walker, 1899).
“Migrate” comes from the Latin word “migrare”, which means changing one’s residence or position. If you’re in England, by the way, you’re likely to hear it pronounced “miGRATE”, with the stress on the second syllable rather than the first. In the US the stress is on the second syllable in “miGRAtion” but on the first in “MIgrate.” There are some interesting connections between “migrate” and some other common English words. The word “common” itself can be traced back to the same roots as can “migrate”, and so can “mutate.” There’s also an ancient Greek word for change or exchange that seems to have come from the same antecedents.
All of these words, though, come with fairly powerful implicit associations. A “migrant worker,” for example, has less to do with whether someone relocates for a job than about their social status. Calling someone a “migrant” is often a slur, even if an implicit one. Not to mention “mutant,” which in the X-Men series is an invented trope to mimic racism and xenophobia.
At the bottom of it all is worry and fear of change. If “different” people move in to an area you live, after all, things might change, and if you’re a worrier, you expect any difference to be for the worse. In fact the word “different,” back in the 1300s, meant “disagreement” or “quarrel.” “Different” is such a difficult concept that English speakers can’t even agree on what kind of a comparison it is when two things aren’t the same. Is “A” different from “B”, different to, or different than? Or for that matter (this one is mostly obsolete), different against?
If it’s difficult to decide how to use “different” in a phrase, there have also been different ways to incorporate “difficult.” Nowadays we say it’s “difficult to” do something that requires a lot of effort or ability, but it used to be just as common to say it was “difficult in”: “Yf apparaunce Of the cause..Be harde and dyffyculte in the vtteraunce” (from about 1517). The construction “difficult of” was current for a while, too: “Markets are so difficult of access” (“The Natural History of Commerce”, by John Yates, 1870).
More recent usage is beginning to represent “difference” (but not “difficult”) as simply “diff.” Words becoming shorter versions of themselves is a pattern you can see over and over in English. But is that process just a change, or is it a migration? Or even a (gasp) mutation? And by the way, just like you can see in the selective application of the term “migrant” to people, lots of people dislike changes in their language, too. After all, you start shortening words right an left and pretty soon you’re claiming that the omnibus that brings the people who harvest your apples is just a bus, and the weapon you need to protect yourself from them isn’t a proper rifle-gun, but just a rifle.
All this change is just too much, and people should stop messing with words just because they might be dyffyculte in the vtteraunce. Or because one speling is different aganst anuther.
