the prorector classes: victory reduced to a quest for synonyms
the hardest thing about his intercom-broadcasts is keeping things from getting repetitive as he goes through long lists of who beat whom and by how much. [...] His quest for synonyms for beat and got beat by is never-ending
Context
The institution's scoreboard rendered as a language problem: the whole meaning of a day's competitive labor collapses into "long lists of who beat whom and by how much," and Troeltsch's professional difficulty is purely lexical — an endless "quest for synonyms for beat and got beat by." Every match, every body's exertion and dread and vomiting in a bucket, arrives at the broadcast as a transitive verb and a score. The reduction is total: the point of all that conditioning is a result, and the result is a word in a list.