“A sense of.”

James Poulos is a writer who can play his cards close to the chest. Over at Postmodern Conservative, he drips out cryptic hints and enigmatic asides with regularity. It makes for engaging reading, even if it's frustrating at first. Either you've read Rieff, MacIntyre, Lasch, and the rest of the books, or you just have to keep put things together like a puzzle with no borders and a few extra pieces.

Way back in November, he posted a list of “Top 10 Irritating Phrases” that weren't your typical grammarian fare. The top two entries were “a sense of” and “In a very real sense…”, and he's pushed back at commentors and interlocutors who have used the phrase. I didn't get it at first. But if he's asking people to “join the fight” (in the comments), I want to know what the problem is. How does “a sense of” destroy the fabric of reality?

Using “a sense of” is clearly legitimate when you're talking about the faculties of sight or smell. “Does your dog have a sense of smell?” Not a problem.

James hates “a sense of” when it relegates what should be the proper subject of a sentence to a propositional clause, and the speaker doesn't do this deliberately. Believing, for example, that “a sense of authority” is the same as “authority” proper, for example.

So, in tough economic times, people focus on restoring a sense of security rather than security itself. A language therapy rather than an actual solution, an attempt to make uncomfortable realities disappear by feeling differently about them. So the difference between saying that someone wants to restore a sense of authority, security, happiness, or whatever, and saying that she wants to restore the authority, security, etc.—this is not a trivial thing.

I think I've solved the puzzle to my own satisfaction. As for my last post, I could have said “a sense of irony” without hurting the fabric of reality, because it would have had the meaning of a faculty for the detection of irony, analagous to the sense of humor, not a feeling of the presence of irony when irony is not actually there (I think this sentence is dangerously close to ending in an infinite recursion). But “irony” worked as well, because, in my experience, the irony of bored graphic designers is not like other people's irony.