The following piece was published in November 2019 in Fairfax Media newspapers and online.
I’ve had it with multiple. It’s a rubbish word. It says nothing. Yet it’s everywhere … in print, online and on the airwaves.
We read of fans who make multiple trips to hear a band, of snakes that bite victims multiple times, and miners who’ve had multiple warnings to clean up their messes.
Anywhere that people write and broadcast English, it seems, you’ll hear the appalling multiple. You’ll read it in Nine mastheads. You’ll see it in The Australian. You’ll hear it on ABC and SBS newscasts.
Moreover, it’s appearing in the poshest papers. Exhibit 1: London Review of Books, 20 December last year. John Lanchester, gun reporter, the man who knows most about the world’s economic intricacies, novelist, gourmand, workaholic (judging by his output), first paragraph of the paper’s lead article, page three.
He’s writing on Agatha Christie, as it happens, and he says: ‘[When] you think that she wrote 66 novels and 14 short story collections, all of them still in print in multiple formats […]’.
I gagged, spilled my oats.
If anyone can judge a rubbish word he’s John Lanchester. Yet there he was, trapped in the tentacles of the most abominable manifestation of contemporary jargon.
In becoming ubiquitous, multiple has annihilated many and several, great, useful words because they actually say something. Multiple is a parasite, a crown of thorns sucking the life out of the coral gardens of English prose.
Multiple doesn’t say even what you might think it does. The way most writers and broadcasters use it, it means absolutely nothing exactly, which is the point.
It’s a word from arithmetic. It should stay there. The number six is a multiple of three and two. The number 48 is a multiple of six and eight. To put it precisely, multiple is a number that can be divided by another number a certain number of times without a remainder. Easy.
How it ever began to stand in for many and several distresses me. And it doesn’t even know its lines. It’s mute when it tries to convey meaning.
Many, on the other hand, tells us that Agatha Christie’s whodunits are in a lot of formats. (Perhaps John Lanchester might have been more accurate if he’d written several formats, which would be not so many as many. I don’t know. He did the writing.)
I trained the magnifying glass on my Compact Oxford (1975, admittedly). Multiple is rare before the 19th century, it begins. Nowhere in the hundreds of words and examples that follow does the dictionary decide it means many or several or a lot of. We’re told about its arithmetical connotation. Then we read that multiple may mean something of many parts. Darwin in 1859, for instance, said to someone: “You overrate the importance of the multiple origin of dogs”. (I wondered if he were cross. Or a dog-owner.) You can have apartment towers that have multiple occupancy. Women have multiple births. You could even say that the AFL is a competition of multiple clubs. But the elements have to be connected for the word to work. Lanchester’s formats differ; it was the point he was trying to make.
And in the days when newspaper owners worried about saving ink and paper, multiple had a letters-count of 6.75. Several’s count is 6.5, and the much lamented many, which no one seems to write any more, is 4.5. When I joined The Age, you staked your career on using short words. We were told never to forget George Orwell’s rule ii: Never use a long word where a short one will do.
I blame the Americans. Possibly Trump, but I don’t read his tweets. Anyway, you get to Merriam-Webster’s definition, and imprecision abounds. We start off with multiple births and multiple choices. Okay. Then the horror rears. Part 2 of entry 1 clearly states that multiple can mean many and manifold. And of the two examples given, the second got me head-banging: “He suffered multiple injuries in the accident.”
America’s cultural hegemony is complete. I was going to call for a royal commission into multiple. March in the streets chanting “Man-y, Man-y, Man-y”. Wave banners saying what a useless word multiple is. I was going to lobby editors and broadcasters. My feelings were strong. Multiple had hurt me profoundly.
But I won’t protest. Why? Because I’ve lost the battle already. Well and truly. And what’s it say about us Australians that we give in to low-rent American culture?
Using multiple is just one way in which the media is diluting its impact. If journalists’ writing was more succinct, more articulate and more consistent grammatically it might also be more powerful. When—not “At a time when”, you’ll notice—governments, commerce and organisations of all sorts are stifling truth, writing with bite is the only antidote.
A few examples.
The words now and currently are ubiquitous. Most of the time they’re not needed. Indeed, many words can be excised from sloppy writing. We write skill sets and drought conditions. Why, when skills and drought do the job? The words all, any and location are almost never needed, yet we read them time and again. “All members of the association must adhere to its rules.” That all members must adhere is implied. “The shop’s location is opposite the train station.” The shop is “opposite the train station”.
Getting the order of words in a sentence wrong is among the easiest ways to enfeeble writing. Only is often misplaced. A recent article on stroke victims said, “Some only retain a few words. One woman could say her husband’s name only”. I’ve never met a man called Only, and these sentences should read, “Some retain only a few words. One woman could say only her husband’s name”.
Weak writing means feeble thinking. Yes, we know what the writer meant in the sentences above. But in writing badly, he or she is signalling a lack of interest in precision, in lightening the readers’ load, in conveying meaning. She’s telling readers that she doesn’t care enough to pick the most powerful verbs, call things by their proper names and write her words in the correct order, the most common characteristics of weak prose. Poor writing also demonstrates to the powerful—to politicians, big business, lobbyists and the malevolent—that we don’t care enough about our thoughts and ideas to aim them accurately. They are easily deflected.
Thoughtful writing is strong and eloquent. I doubt that it has ever been needed more.
While many—I’m among them—have reservations about Churchill’s politics, he could write. (In short sentences, too, the first quality of powerful prose.) “We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be.”
Like many others, I believe that the power and eloquence of Churchill’s words helped to win the war. In Australia, the media are fighting obfuscation and bastardry of all hues, censorship and defamation laws that hinder transparency, and freedom-of-information requests that are answered only many months later, many words blacked out. I believe that more powerful, more precise English could be a new, old-tech weapon in the battle.