The Great Replacement

Words and their misuse.

I see the word multiple being misused increasingly. For example..

“...with multiple people looking on...”

It’s an ugly and grotesque construction. They mean, actually, “...many people...”.

Multiple carries a clinical, almost technical sense; it belongs in laboratory reports, legal documents or engineering specifications. The word counts and categorises. When you apply it to people, you’re unnecessarily reducing them to units in a tally. It’s dehumanising in a very insidiously subtle, but very real way.

“Many people looked on” is warm, natural and human and it does not deprive them of their personalities: you can almost see them. “Multiple people looked on”, sounds like a bunch of faceless clones.

The same coldness creeps in with individuals, another word that’s migrated out of official/bureaucratic language into everyday speech. “Multiple individuals were present at the scene”, is the language of a police report. It distances the speaker from any human feeling about the situation.

This coldness probably appeals to some people: it sounds objective, detached and professional. But in doing so they’re using a tone that’s entirely wrong for the context, and the result is ugly and grotesque. The language doesn’t fit the human moment it’s describing.

It’s part of a broader trend of people reaching for technical or bureaucratic vocabulary to sound authoritative, without realising they’re draining the life out of their sentences in the process. Worse they’re burying all the rich, colourful subtleties of our English language.

Good plain English: “many,” “several,” “a crowd,” “dozens”, is always more vivid and more honest.

---