The Multipleitis Disease

 

The Multipleitis Disease

“…citing multiple people …” (my emphasis)

Journalists are afflicted with the disease mentioned in the heading–Multipleitis. And, MS Word is the carrier for this disease. I know. I am typing the full name of the disease, multipleit is, and the software changes it to, multipleit is, as it has earlier in this sentence.

Only when I bang hard and multiple times (the editor, if I had one, would have/should have struck multiple and rewrote the phrase as “…bang hard repeatedly…”) on the keys in the keyboard, MS Word wakes up and gives me the permission to type what I wish to type, multipleitis. Ha, ha … I finally got what I wanted, no matter MS Word disapproves of my usage by underlining the offending word with a squiggly line.

In my wordsmithy, I use simple words like “many” in place of “multiple”. An example: as I drove from Tejpur to Guwahati, I saw so many children, many of them girls, going to school, I felt the nation is on the right track. If I am afflicted by multipleitis (copy pasted from above, again with the red squiggly line) I would have written, as most journalists do these days, “I saw multiple children, multiple of them girls, going to school … Yuk, yuk, I was vomiting even as I typed the alternative.

I admit that "multiple" is more indicative of a numerical measure, like one time, twice ...multiple times, as compared to many (does not differentiate between two times and a dozen times, for example). Then, I have a another alternative for you: "a number of times". I would like a derivative of multiple, "multiplicity" that calmost means uncounted/uncountable, more the former than the latter. That is it, of course, beyond the multiplication tables, the proper place for use of a derivative of the root word, "multiple". 

The opening line of this post is from The Guardian, a newspaper I go to everyday without fail, indeed many times to check for updates and new material. For it to have fallen ill with multipleitis, I bury my face in my hands. I have no idea how to cure this disease. Perhaps I would approach the US Food and Drug Administration and plead with them many times to find an antidote.

Raghuram Ekambaram