ROME: 27th November '04 --  Possibly neither, referring to that title, but we do have to be alert to what we are doing to our English language.  I refer to the creeping use, in English, of the adjective 'organic' in our Salesian literature.

    It was only around 1928 that the OED admitted the adjective with the meaning that we often employ these days, that is, to do with bodily organs or at least with living bodies.  The 1928 OED allowed that it be applied to 'soil', particularly of the manured and fertilised kind!  Over the years, in English, the word has taken on something of a romantic flavour, especially when a prominent American architect applied it to a kind of domestic architecture ('organic architecture', he called it) that was warm and cosy, inviting, and used natural fibres and materials.  Today, in supermarkets, 'organic' on a label is intended to conjure up idyllic scenes, cows peacefully chewing the cud, foods naturally grown and therefore 'good' for us, all that sort of thing.

    So where on earth do we Salesians get an Organic Provincial Project from?  A product from our agricultural colleges?  Obviously not.

    Simply put, it is another example of the difference between two languages, in this case Italian and English, which for some reason we have seemed loathe to accept in practice.  Italian uses the adjective 'organico' in a much broader sense than does English.  There is no particular problem in employing the adjective in a variety of contexts where the intention is to speak of an integrated whole, something with system to it, even, broadly speaking an organised entity of various kinds, a project or plan.  A bilingual dictionary is helpful, but the real clue to the difference is to discover what collocational patterns exist for 'organic' in the two languages - then the difference becomes immediately apparent.  In English, 'organic' collocates  with words like chemistry, food, agriculture, gardening, compounds, and, yes, pollutants (something that can be discovered from, say, the Brown Corpus with millions of English words in it).  It does not collocate so easily with projects, provincials and the like!

    It has to be said that at the beginning of this century, even in Italian the use of the adjective 'organico' caused Don Rua to write a Circular Letter to the Salesians to explain that GC10 in 1904, just a century ago, had used the adjective 'organico' to describe its deliberations, distinguishing between 'deliberazioni organiche' and 'deliberazioni  precettive'.  Rua's problem was that GC10 used it but did not define it, so what precisely did they mean?  Good question. He resolved the problem by pointing out that Don Bosco himself had employed it in GC1 in reference to things that were constitutional by nature.

    In 1978 Fr Vigano described the Preventive System, or rather GC21's comments about the PS, as 'un insieme organico di....' that is as an integrated whole comprising attitudes, actions, values and so forth.  So when GC25 eventually prescribed a 'Progetto Organico Ispettoriale' or POI, there was really already a good Italian pedigree, despite a minor wobble in 1904, for the term in that kind of context. 

    The problem is not so much with Italian, but with English.  Uncritical use of a word that sounds ok but leads us off into strange associations, is not in our best interests.  Another case of linguistic laziness, in fact, where it's just so easy to type 'organic' when translating from 'organico' that we don't bother to check what the collocational impact of an Organic Provincial Project really might be.

    The solution is either to accept that a project is of its very nature organised and systematic, thus drop the adjective altogether in English, or to replace it with a term or circumlocution that makes the systematic and/or integrated nature of the entity clear.  At all costs, in this writer's humble opinion, we should avoid using the adjective 'organic' in the contexts we have been doing so these last thirty years or so, namely in official Salesian texts about provincial projects, social communication and other like systems.