Mea Culpa: A subject lesson

Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent, delivered from a rough sea by Susanna Richards

Some Belgian aeronauts being subjected to assistance by British sailors in about 1880 (Getty)

In a comment piece about the dangers surrounding a bank collapse, we wrote: “So, in rapid fashion, we’ve seen Silicon Valley Bank, Signature, Credit Suisse and First Republic all subjected to rescues and bailouts.” This use of “subjected” poses a question: should we instead have written “subject”? I think so, and I’ll tell you why.

These two very similar words are often mixed up, but they are not always interchangeable. The word “subject”, when it is not being a noun or a verb, can often be seen performing as an adjective in the phrase “subject to”, which means “affected by” or “conditional on”. “Subjected to”, on the other hand, is a phrasal verb, and it means that whatever has happened, it was actively done to the person or thing being discussed. Thus it is commonly used in the context of an unwelcome intervention, and can imply negativity all by itself, as in “I was subjected to a visit from my favourite aunt.”

It’s true that, in the example above, the bailouts were “done to” the banks. But we can presume that they wanted to be rescued – leaving aside the unwelcomeness of the situation that demanded it – and so the use of “subjected” seems anomalous. Short of recasting the sentence entirely, we ought to have changed it to the neutral-sounding “subject”.