Language is always in flux, we’re told, but sometimes the changes are deeply pernicious. Take the word “process,” which now sticks like clingwrap to nouns that used to stand proudly alone. For example, instead of a campaign, it’s now the “campaign process”; an election is now the “election process”; admissions has become the “admissions process”; and grading is now the “grading process.” The worst case of all, for those of us in education, is “learning,” which has been utterly destroyed by becoming the “learning process.”

“Process” doesn’t attach itself to any old noun. (We don’t have a “couch process” or a “cake process.”) It wants nouns that already encompass a process, where it is, of course, redundant. This shouldn’t surprise anybody, since it’s in the nature of weak things to want to sidle up to stronger things. “Process” is such a weak word that it wobbles when used alone. Its slyness comes from how miraculously it manages to gain strength merely by standing next to any noun that is forced to support it. The result is that nouns that admittedly might have involved complex ideas become more difficult and abstract than they were previously, and that a new creature emerges — a hybrid word that’s meaningless without the help of experts.

The first order of business for experts is, of course, to come up with some kind of chart (a flow chart is always nice) so that we dummies who aren’t experts can understand how much more complex the thing under consideration is than we’d heretofore known. If you want to see a nice fat flow chart about the learning process, pick one at random from the web. I myself liked this one. The big oval-shaped bubbles connect with one another via swirling arrows, providing a perfect, hermetically sealed system of learning.

It doesn’t take a degree in linguistics to see that the takeover of plain old nouns by the word “process” is a symptom that English is in trouble. It’s under assault by bureaucrats who want to make what they do sound more important than it really is. Forcing perfectly good nouns to capitulate to the word “process” inflates our language and will eventually make it good for nothing other than charts.

I have to conclude my blogging process now. I’ve got to move on to my cooking process so I can indulge in my eating process so I can then get to my sleeping and dreaming process. There, I hope to dream sweet dreams about anything other than the charting process.