Welcome to the Mea Culpa Experience

John Rentoul experiences some stylistic preferences in The Independent’s use of English last week

There’s been a call for masks on public transport – but was it an expert one? (PA)

If I ever get round to dividing up the Banned List into categories, one would be “weak words”. Most of them are long and vague in meaning, and are sometimes used to try to sound more important than a shorter word. This week’s example is “experience”. It comes from the Latin meaning knowledge that has come out of (ex–) testing (peritus), the same source as “experiment”.

In English, its main meaning by the 16th century was “a state of having done something and become good at it”, but it was always fuzzy. Thus we ended up with modern corporate-speak, such as the passenger experience or the user experience, which just means “what people think of our product”.

We lapsed into this use of the word in our report of a man who died eight days after he was “rescued from the simulated cave experience” in an adventure park. We could have just called it a simulated cave.