Nominal language

Here's the opening of an AP article published today:

Americans are wary of granting refugee status to children crossing the U.S. border to flee strife-torn countries in Central America....

What struck me is that this could be written as:

Americans are wary of granting refugee status to children who are refugees....

Granted, admitting that someone is a refugee and granting that person refugee status are two different things.

But in a land where we can transubstantiate things into other things by calling them the other things -- like marriage, or healthcare -- maybe we can also transubstantiate them into other things by not calling them what they are.

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