Mind your language
'IDIOT,' said my husband, but he wasn't speaking to me. Someone had just used the word deconstruct on the wireless when it was clear, even to my husband, that the wireless voice had no postmodernist intent but meant no more than 'analyse'.
I thought I might have missed a new school of philosophy the next day, when I heard someone arguing that it was wrong to classify phenomena by applying a presumed process to them. The exam- ple was the taxonomic classification of animals according to an underlying pro- cess of evolution by natural selection.
In a more homely context I heard on the same day a bank apologising that it had failed in its monitoring process. That certainly did not sound like a philosophical theory.
Just because a word such as process has suddenly suffered a voguish popular- ity, it does not mean its ancestry is dis- reputable. A phrase in the writings of Richard Rolle of Hampole (which the OED has kindly sought out for me) from the mid-14th century sounds, but is not, as voguish as any modern usage: 'We must work be [by] processe of tyrne.' Chaucer writes of 'the process of nature', like any official from a National Park.
But two injections by thinkers boosted the potency of process as a smart chat- terer's word. One came from A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947) who used it, as far as I can see, in exactly the same sense as a translator of Aristotle or the Scholastics would use movement or motion. And 40 years before Whitehead got going, the founding fathers of social science were already using process in contradistinction to structure. When structuralism turned up, two genera- tions later, process was in a fine old pickle of ambiguity.
Meanwhile in the real world process had been used, from 1902 or so, of 'ren- ovated' butter that was rendered (like cows' tallow) and dyed and mashed up to look as good as new. The same word was proudly taken up by the makers of process cheese, though the adjective is now often rationalised into processed. Printing and photography also eagerly grabbed process for their own purposes.
All the time, from the late 16th cen- tury, anatomists used process to refer to a bit of body sticking out, usually a bony projection such as the 'vaginal process'. That, by association of ideas, is what my husband, in his medical way, says he is always reminded of whenever he hears a careless television journalist talking of the 'Northern Ireland peace
process'. Dot Wordsworth
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