In 2016, a heroic snob in the European Commission got fed up, it seems. This person, Jeremy Gardner, prepared a rather testy document auditing “misused English words and expressions in EU publications” in an effort to rein in the abominable bureaucratese that proliferates in that organization. It begins:
“Over the years, the European institutions have developed a vocabulary that differs from that of any recognised form of English. It includes words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the EU institutions and often even to standard spellcheckers/grammar checkers (‘planification’, ‘to precise’ or ‘telematics,’ for example) and words that are used with a meaning, often derived from other languages, that is not usually found in English dictionaries (‘coherent’ being a case in point).”
Fashionable erosions of good usage by highly educated people are not unique to the European Union or diplomats. Many large organizations and fields take on so many jargon-laden conventions that the people who work in them start to write and speak in what can almost seem like a sort of dialect. “Legalese,” “corporatese,” and “academese” come to mind.
In the EU misuse catalog, the very first entry concerns the issue of pluralization: “A number of the errors mentioned in this paper can be ascribed less to a question of meaning than to an aspect of English grammar that seems to have gone relatively unnoticed in the English teaching in European schools — the distinction between countable and uncountable (or mass) nouns.“
Garner’s Modern Usage distinguishes count nouns that “denote enumerable things and that are capable of forming plurals (e.g., cranes, parties, minivans, oxen)” from “often abstract” mass nouns that “cannot be enumerated (e.g., insurance, courage, mud).” It notes that many nouns can be both count and mass nouns, exemplified by the two correct formulations “he gave several talks” and “talk is cheap.” But most nouns are one or the other.
This brings us to Cornell, where in October, the English Department faculty voted by an overwhelming majority to change its name to “the department of literatures in English.” Two discrete reasons are given: First, the name change would help to eliminate “the ‘conflation of English as a language and English as a nationality.’” So, it’s about precision in case anyone thinks they are studying the country of England and not the language, which we are asked to believe is a real concern. The second reason is that justice demands it. The Cornell Daily Sun reports that “the decision to demand such a change was spurred by this summer’s resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following George Floyd’s death.” And per the chairwoman of the department, “This isn’t just us doing a symbolic gesture. This is in keeping with the university’s call to have us really rethink our everyday practices around racism.”
I have been thinking about this since it happened, and I simply cannot see a logical connection between deploring racist barbarity in the Minnesotan police force and deciding to pretend as though “literature” is a count noun, when “literature” is plainly already an abstract plural mass noun. One must take racism deeply unseriously to think it can be ameliorated with a stray “s.” The best explanation is that using certain designated jargon is, for academics as for diplomats, a cheap signal of the most vacuous sort of sympathy — “the white liberal version of ‘thoughts and prayers,’” as Cornell psychology professor David Pizarro called it on a recent podcast.
One would hope English scholars would try some other recourse besides twisting English grammar to communicate solidarity. One would hope vainly.
