It is noticeable these days that many abstract words have sprouted plurals. "Competences" is one such. You also see "competencies". I dislike both of these. "Competence" is a good, plain, singular word. It doesn't hunt in packs. "Competences" and "competencies" are used by the linguistically incompetent, not to say incontinent.

Today's Pseudsday Tuesday comes from Australia - from Murdoch University, to be precise. Is this anything to do with Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Sun? If so, coupled with the fact that it is in Australia, you would expect its students to use plain English: words like "strewth" and "sport" and "g'day". Not Dr Helen Hatchell, who has turned plural abstractions into a fine art in her study of "Masculinities and Whiteness: The Shaping of Adolescent Male Students' Subjectivities in an Australian Boys' School". Silly plural abstracts are coloured red:

In my thesis I explore way in which adolescent male students negotiate and interrogate discursive ideologies relating to hegemonic masculinities and to the normality of "whiteness", specifically within one English classroom in an Australian private single sex boys’ school in Perth, Western Australia.  A feminist poststructuralist theoretical framework is employed to explore how gendered and racialized positions available to adolescent males contribute to the shaping of their subjectivities, and how the social constructions of masculinities and femininities contribute to the ways in which adolescent males represent themselves. A quantitative approach, which included individual classroom observations, questionnaires and interviews, provided me with tools essential for examining the complexities of the effects of social constructs such as gender, sexuality and ethnicity on masculinist positionings at school.  The study reveals the complexities surrounding discourses of hegemonic heterosexual masculinities and privileges of whiteness on the situationally specific formation and negotiation of subjectivities in adolescent males’ lives in one school.
 
Central findings of the study show that adolescent males in this single sex boys’ school easily maintained socially constructed ideas surrounding the feminisation of females and masculinization of males, with notions of homophobia embedded in discourses of hegemonic masculinities. A resistance to alternative masculine discourses shows the impact and maintenance of hegemonic heterosexual masculinities for adolescent males.  However, through the use of particular texts, female teachers in the all boys’ classroom were able to open up spaces for male students to interrogate hegemonic forms of masculinities, to interrogate power relationships, and to access alternative masculinities.  In a similar vein, my findings show how easy it is for students to ignore social injustices in relation to racism and stereotyping of Indigenous Australians, and to retain notions that reinforce these injustices. 

Alternative masculinities? What happened to good old fagging, roasting and buggery behind the bike shed?  These embedded discourse malarkies wouldn't go down well in the beds of Eton.