Progress, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy points out (Christian Future), was originally a plural term. “Les progres” was Condorcet’s phrase. What he had in mind were improvements, new gadgets and machines and gizmos.
The singular form of the term came from early Christianity and referred to the spiritual improvement of man. Clearly, the plural and singular don’t necessary move in unison: “Bombs get better all the time,” Rosenstock points out, but we are making progress in the original sense only in “NOT-using” them (77).
The two dimensions of the term came together in the nineteenth century “The distinction between the progress of the soul as instituted by the Christian era, and les progres, multiplied by applying the idea to the new fields of arts and sciences, was obliterated by an ambiguity in English which is not rare. The English translators of Condorcet, and the Great World Exhibition in the Crystal Palace of London, and the Chicago Century of Progress, all used the singular, and thereby mixed the religious original and the technical applications into one unholy welter” (77).
