The Ceuta story is wrapping up this weekend, and the coverage has quietly agreed on its closing verb: return. Euronews: 'More than 48,000 migrants return to Morocco after mass crossing into Ceuta.' Return. Like a long weekend ended. Like a library book. * Now watch the grammar do a little dance inside the same article. Euronews's opening line says 48,000 people 'have already been returned to Morocco.' Been returned — passive voice, somebody did the returning. By the time that sentence climbed up to the headline, it flipped active: migrants return. Between paragraph one and the headline, the agency moved from the Spanish state to the migrants themselves. Funny — that's the one migration nobody held an emergency EU meeting about. * So who did the returning? The BBC's Sunday wrap-up carries the missing personnel, in plain sight: most of those who swam in 'have now returned to Morocco, escorted to the border by Spanish soldiers and police.' Escorted. By soldiers. That is the clause the word 'return' was hired to not say out loud. * There's a legal reason the verb matters. As the BBC also notes, Spain's own Supreme Court recently ruled that people who enter by sea 'cannot be pushed back immediately' — the very ruling smugglers twisted into 'Spain is open.' Which puts the week's vocabulary in a delicate spot: 'pushed back' has a court ruling attached to it. 'Returned' just has a shrug. When tens of thousands of people go back through a border in about a day, the difference between those two words is not style — it's whether anyone has to answer questions later. * Al Jazeera, for its part, kept the attribution visible — its coverage ran under 'Spain says' migrants are leaving — and then moved on to the new hardware: 'Spain installs floating barrier off Ceuta after deadly migrant crossings.' Deadly is carrying a precise number: at least 67 people, pulled from water still littered with rubber rings and flippers. * Sixty-seven people died going. Nobody died coming back — linguistically speaking. The state moved 48,000 human beings with soldiers, and the headlines filed it under the same verb you'd use for a rental car. All week, the people in the water got exactly one fully honest clause — and it was sitting in the middle of a Sunday explainer, not on any front page: escorted to the border by soldiers and police.