Are two many ?

I have just finished reading an English translation of Gabriel Chevallier’s novel Clochemerle for the first time. Very entertaining, in spite of its somewhat untidy, unbalanced structure and anticlimactic end.

The translator seems to have done an excellent job. There is no hint in the text that the story was not actually written in English - except, of course, that the characters, locations and situations seem, to an English reader at any rate, to be so essentially French. Many of my books end up with pencilled comments on lapses of grammar, punctuation and word misuse, but in my Penguin Clochemerle (55p at a charity shop) there is, in three hundred and thirteen pages, only one such lapse - and that a word usage that many a sound writer of English would not regard as seriously reprehensible: the phrase “a multiplicity of alternatives”.

In simple English one might say (or write) “lots of choices”. The mildly facetious, latinate, “multiplicity of alternatives” not only has exactly two and a half times the number of syllables (not necessarily a fault; that will depend on style and context); but disregards the fact that Latin alter means ‘one or other of two’: and ‘two’ can hardly be considered ‘multiplex’.

'Alternative' is not just a posh synonym for 'choice'.

Are two many ?