A Quibble About Pronunciation

I am a cog in the capitalist machine. My work life looks a lot like Neo's at the beginning of The Matrix except with less privacy and the computers aren't as cute. As such I attend a lot of meetings and hear a lot of business jargon, and a pattern has emerged in these meetings that really irks me.

It’s the pronunciation of the word “processes.”

All linguists, whether they know it or not, belong to one of two schools: prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivism is a “normative” approach, meaning there’s a "preferred" way to use a language. You've certainly encountered prescriptivists in the form of Grammar Police. Descriptivists, on the other hand, assert that languages are organic and ever-changing. Linguists can only describe what they observe rather than impose their favorite rules. In other words, the only “right” way to speak a language is the way it happens to be spoken. If you hadn’t guessed, I myself am a descriptivist.

That said…

Most of the high-ranking individuals in my organization pronounce the plural form of process as “process-ease”, similar to crisis -> crises or analysis -> analyses.

The latter two words derive from Greek roots and you’ll notice that their singular and plural forms only differ by one vowel. The pronunciation “cris-ease,” then, further differentiates the plural from the singular. Without this vowel change the two forms would be easily conflated. This is a useful mutation.

Process, on the other hand, derives from Latin and the plural is quite regular: processes. Even though the singular ends in -s there’s no need to pronounce this plural differently from any other English plural. It works just like course -> courses or miss -> misses.

I’m allowed to have a little prescriptivism as a treat, okay? This pronunciation of processes has a sort of self-aggrandizing connotation to it, like the know-it-all who blurts out that the plural of octopus is actually octopodes. Except it doesn't even work on that level because "process-ease" is etymologically baseless.

Bonus: I once had a meteorology professor who frequently said “underneath of it.” I think he reversed “on top of it” and applied the same prepositional structure. It still makes my eye twitch.