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.

But usually, we use it instead of shorter, more direct words. In a weather report, we wrote that somewhere “would experience cooler temperatures”, when we could have said “would be cooler”. In an article about medical cannabis, we said that, in one study, “38 per cent of all patients with cancer experience moderate to severe pain”. I think “suffer” would be a better word.

Elsewhere we had a couple of instances of “lived experiences” (as opposed, we imagine, to those endured by dead people), but we shall draw a veil over them and move on.

Declaring independence: A good rule of thumb is to avoid the word “expert” in headlines, because the importance of the story often depends on whether the reader agrees with our use of that word. Last weekend we had the headline: “Face masks should be worn again on public transport, experts say.” This suggestion came from Professor Stephen Griffin, who is chair of Independent Sage. This is the body that was set up in the early stages of the pandemic to disagree with the advice to the government of the official Sage, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, so its expertise is disputed.

Drugs and drugs: On Wednesday we reported that “Medicinal cannabis ‘can ease cancer pain and reduce need for drugs’”. John Harrison knew what we meant, but pointed out that cannabis is a drug, and that we needed to say something like “other drugs that have worse side-effects”.

Lonely ‘of’: Iain Boyd, another frequent correspondent, spotted this ungainly sentence in a court report: “At the start of the trial yesterday, the High Court in London heard that the environmentalist was accused of ‘abusing his privileged position as a BBC presenter’ to dishonestly appeal for donations for the charity, which he and his partner Charlotte Corney are trustees of”. As Iain said: “Never end a sentence with a preposition” is not a rule of grammar; it is a stylistic preference. Stylistically, he and I would prefer “of which he is a trustee, along with his partner Charlotte Corney”.

Pollsterocracy: On our front page after the local elections our sub-headline said: “Conservatives face losing 1,000 seats but pollsters question Labour’s claim they’re on course for general election majority.” A minor glitch that might cause the reader only a flicker of uncertainty, but I was entertained by the idea of YouGov, Opinium, Savanta and the others forming a government of national unity after the next general election.