Guilty of carrying out atrocities against language

I wonder if somebody can help me with this one. What is "some kind of Holocaust"? Combining the Greek for whole with the Greek for fire, the word holocaust, used without emotion, free of its recent master-race associations, means whole burnt offering, a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire. Anything not wholly consumed by fire is not a holocaust. So it's hard to have "some kind" of one. As a description of the fate that was visited by the Nazis on the Jews, the word does, I grant you, overstate the case, since the offering was not wholly consumed; but we have come to accept that it will do for a near miss, a conflagration on an unimaginable scale that aimed at completeness, even if it narrowly failed of it. So once again "some kind of Holocaust", like some kind of Armageddon, is a nonsense. You cannot have approximate annihilation.

We can thank Mona Baker, the Professor of Translation Studies at Umist, for this latest academic example of linguistic imposture, or Paulin-speak as I think we should now refer to it. Professor Baker, if you have not been keeping up with happenings in the field of language engineering, has recently sacked, or "de-appointed" in her words, two Israeli scholars from the advisory boards of a couple of academic journals she edits. Allowing that she also owns these journals, and that there is no law against academics being proprietors of journals of disinterested scholarship, she is, of course, within her rights to do whatever she wants with members of her advisory boards. The only problem is that she has de-appointed the two Israelis for no other reason than that they are Israelis. Which would be a bit like – since Professor Baker likes things which are a bit like – her university sacking her because she is Egyptian.

It was in defence of her action in de-appointing the Israeli scholars for the crime of being Israeli that Professor Baker delivered herself of her now notorious "some kind of Holocaust" remark, a solecism for which, as a language professional (whatever her nationality), she should at the very least be reprimanded, ignorance being an even greater fault in an academic than an Israeli passport. But let us, by way of justice, return her phrase to the swell of thought from which we have extracted it. "Many people in Europe have signed a boycott against Israel. Israel has gone beyond just war crimes. It is horrific what is going on there. Many of us would like to talk about it as some kind of Holocaust which the world will eventually wake up to, much too late, of course, as they did with the last one."

I like "the last one". Holocausts come and holocausts go, eh, Professor. And you, as a scholar of language, are trained to make light verbal work of them all.

Everything Professor Baker says is worthy of our attention by virtue of its inanity. Take "Israel has gone beyond just war crimes". What does that mean, exactly? War crimes are a serious matter, which is why they are called crimes, and it is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which they could be qualified by a "merely". Leaving us where, politically and morally, and Israel guilty of precisely what? Rape? Well that's just a war crime. Torture? Well that's a just a war crime, too. Cannibalism, then? Is that it – the horror, the horror! And when we are shaken from our doze of innocence by Professor Baker and discover that a sort-of, kind-of, more-or-less Holocaust has been in place, what will we find? Extermination centres? Gas ovens? Laboratories charged with the extinction of the enemy gene?

It is important that we know what we mean. We do not serve the present by misdescribing it, and even worse we obliterate the past. Once everything is a war crime, nothing is. Turn every abomination into a whatever-takes-your-fancy holocaust, and there never really was one. This is the trickle-down effect of continuous verbal and syntactical diminishment. Little by little, the thing itself is washed away. Thus, though Professor Baker does not mean to be a Holocaust-denier, that is what she has effectively become.

The power of language, you see, of which Professor Baker, as someone who has worked as a professional translator for 20 years and whose current research interests include "pragmatics and intercultural communication", the "use of corpora as a resource for studying various features of translation" and "patterning... in terms of notions such as simplification", should be particularly mindful. But then that has always been the problem with academic linguisticians – they know the science of language but they are deaf to the thing itself. Nobody with any feeling for the vitality of English, for example, could ever write "in terms of notions such as simplification". And as for this Professor's interest in "intercultural communication"... But hold your horses, she has more to say on that theme...

"Translation studies can and will hopefully" – yes, she employs the barbarism hopefully – "continue to draw on a variety of discourses and disciplines and to encourage pluralism and heterogeneity". Provided, that is, that the discourses and disciplines do not originate in Israel? In the light of which exclusion, Professor, are you not discouraging that pluralism to which you hopefully, and may I add mindlessly, refer?

Cant, so much sanctimony and cant. By her actions, Professor Baker has shown that it is homogeneity not heterogeneity she wants, everyone believing the same thing, everyone shutting down their intelligences together, else there is no place for them in the commonwealth of scholarship as understood by her.

Academies are timid places, and because she has not behaved discourteously to a favoured group, Mona Baker won't face official censure. But if I were a school-leaver wondering where to study language in the autumn, I'd be thinking twice before going to an institution where at least one professor has a cloth ear, a closed mind, and does not grasp the meaning of simple terms in frequent use.

The self-righteousness, of course, I'd expect.