Why Are Students Writing ‘Majority’ When They Mean ‘Most’?

Working through student papers this semester I’ve noticed a phenomenon that I don’t think I’ve stumbled across before. It’s the rise of the word majority as a way of describing the greater part of anything.

This seems to be the case whether or not the thing being described would, in the normal course of things, be countable.

So for example, “For the majority of her life, Sally ate Cream of Wheat for breakfast.”

Sally, who either loved the stuff or was doing a life sentence somewhere, faced Cream of Wheat day after day. But you’d probably say that she had done so for most of her life.

Or take Jim, who has been busy in the garden. “The majority of the plants in Sunny Acres are cared for by Jim Smith.”

One could say the majority of the plants or most of the plants, and the difference is small. Maybe the writer wants to emphasize something about the measurable, specifiable quantity of flora in Sunny Acres. Most would do that, too, and less self-consciously.

“During a trip to Six Flags, Ferdinand and Isabella went on the majority of the rides. Juana, on the other hand, spent the majority of the family vacation applying SPF 30 and reading Foucault by the pool.”

Many — I can’t say most — of my readers will think Juana made the right choice.

I’ve never found that a student writing about the majority of something comments on the minority of that thing.

“I ate the majority of my dinner, and gave the minority to my brother, who was still hungry” is a sentence I have a hard time imagining any real-world person saying.

Minority once indicated an immature stage in life. “During the prince’s minority, the kingdom was governed by a council of advisers.”  That usage seems impossibly far away, now that the term is completely identified with issues of race, or gender, or sexual expression, or any of a score of other ways people have become countable.

When students, or anyone else, choose majority over most, the gesture may be about sounding official, formal, more grown-up. But if I point out to students that they wouldn’t say “I drank the majority of this latte, and you can finish the rest,” they understand that majority works most easily with countable things, and specifically things where countability is a signal feature.

Votes, for example. “The majority voted to burn the witches at the stake. The minority, however, argued that drowning would be more compassionate. The witches were burned, which shows that democracy can work.”

In a different tumultuous era, following the events of 1968, Richard Nixon spoke out about those who were not engaging in protest. He called them the silent majority and claimed them as his political kin.

Nixon could have said that he was claiming kinship with most of America, a big, quietly invisible group holding back while louder voices took the microphones and looked into the camera’s eye.

But it was the electoral specificity of majority that gave the phrase its tremendous rhetorical power, and in politics, rhetorical power is, if not everything, just about everything. Ask Cicero.

I don’t imagine my students see a connection between their preference for majority over most and the potential for organizing the power of citizens, but it’s much on my mind as I read their work.

A majority isn’t the most of something — a garden, a bowl of Cream of Wheat, an amusement park vacation — it’s people who can change things by voting, if they would only vote.