Mea Culpa: getting ‘systemic’ out of our system

Questions of style and grammar in last week’s Independent, by John Rentoul

Donations to the RNLI have recently surged (Getty Images)

In a report of the prosecution of a German man aged 100, who had been a prison guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, we said that 20,000 people had been killed there, including by “forced labour, medical experiments and systemic extermination”. John Harrison wrote to say that he thought we meant “systematic” rather than “systemic”, and I agree with him.

Systematic means purposeful, according to a plan, whereas systemic means relating to a system. Systemic has been used a lot recently to describe the way in which systems or procedures can be racist in effect, sometimes without racist intent on the part of an individual.

It is rather confusing to apply a word commonly used in that sense to the Nazi genocide, especially when this case concerns the alleged culpability of the person who is the subject of the story.