Articles in the Economist are, for the most part, without bylines. At http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10286340 [1], the Economist declares that the French are fleeing abstract nouns based on nothing more than Sarkozy's election. I approve of Sarkozy, for the most part, but abstract nouns are about reality and are not so easily evaded.

Letters to the Editor
Economist

To whom it may concern:

In "The Decline of the [French] Abstract Noun [in France] [mais oui]", your as always droll and readable correspondent, whose name might be Legion but who writes well, tells us that under Sarkozy, the French are fleeing abstract nouns and embracing verbs and their gerunds such as le jogging.

However, as soon as one tries to speak even of such a peppy activity as jogging (which the French have been doing almost as long as the Yanks, with better results to all appearances) the gerund names an idea after all.

Merely banning abstract words does not exorcise abstraction, and business deals in abstractions such as "good credit" despite the deconstruction (if you please) of these abstractions in financial panics.

If it is not fashionable to speak of "fraternity", then what replaces brotherhood? Unfortunately, its gender-neutral synonym happens to be "solidarity", a word which gives business managers the willies because of its union-label connotation. So what replaces it? Its opposite, a global village in which everyone must compete all the time with everyone else, and who hates and fears his neighbors?

If it is not fashionable to speak of "equality", then what unmentionable replaces it? Lots of luck in stumping up a choir, to sing Hosannahs in honor of inequality.

If it is not fashionable to speak of "liberty" what unmentionable replaces it?

Since France won't be producing cheap toys in any foreseeable future, it will be instead dealing in abstractions such as equity, stocks, and bonds, abstractions given only a partial reality, a reality subject to endogenous and exogenous shocks.

A set of noble, or perhaps noble-sounding, abstractions such as liberty, equality and the rest are in fact replaced by a new set.

All that is solid, the infamous Marx said, melts into air. 75 years on, the madmen in authority of which Keynes spoke heard voices in that air, speaking perhaps of stocks and bonds and how their valuation, like that of the British pound, was a verity in comparision to liberty, fraternity, and equality.

The problem isn't in the use of abstract nouns; if there were none such, life would be nasty, brutish, short and quickly forgotten. It's the willingness to bring about the conditions named by positive abstract nouns. Sarkozy has, I think, a fundamental dedication to the big words, but cannot see how they can be realities without a France less bloody-minded and more willing to work.

After taking control of Vichy, Marshal Petain said that the France of tobacco dens and long digestions would give way to a France, of group hikes. Sarkozy makes no such binary opposition: in fact, le jogging, in my experience, assists abstract thinking. France can be more than a France of Petain, or of Chirac. For the same reason a corporation needs a mission statement, this France will still have to speak of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Regards

Edward G. Nilges