Mea Culpa: concrete stairway leading to nowhere

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

To avoid being caught short, Ed Miliband always had a healthy supply of concrete steps growing in his back garden (Tony Avent)

Generally, I think we do a good job of explaining the complex and technical problems of trade and border controls after our departure from the EU, but occasionally we falter. Last week, for example, we said: “The business community was waiting for ministers to explain what the UK’s border operating model would be before it could take concrete steps.” This was before Friday’s announcement that the government’s policy on border controls was not to bother with most of them.

Talk about piling abstraction upon the already abstract. Instead of “the business community” we could have said “companies”; instead of “operating model” we could have said “rules”; and then we get to the concrete steps.

I remember Ed Miliband, when he was leader of the Labour Party, boldly declaring that he was going to take concrete steps to do something. The next thing I knew he was standing next to a tablet of stone with some vacuous – and mostly pretty abstract – slogans carved in it. Let that be a warning to us all.

The phrase “concrete steps” is a self-defeating attempt to make the abstract sound, well, concrete. All it does, if it registers at all as more than a clunky figure of speech, is conjure up in the mind’s eye a picture of tiered brutalist slabs.

Phasers to stun: In a cookery feature our writer paused to listen to birdsong and noted that “some things, at least, remain unphased by coronavirus”. That should be “unfazed” – to faze is to disturb or disconcert someone. A while ago it would have been deprecated as an Americanism, because it was fashionable in the US in the 19th century, but like faucet, fall and gotten it was exported from the Old World before being reimported. It is a form of feeze, “drive or frighten off”, which comes from Old English.

Anyway, it has nothing to do with “phase”.

Tipping point: We referred in a headline to “our imbalanced economy”. That should have been “unbalanced”. You can talk about “an imbalance” – as indeed the article did – but it is not usually used as an adjective. That is, as a reader pointed out the last time we did it, quite imnecessary.

To be or not to be: “Existential” is a silly word. We had it in an editorial about the BBC’s new director general last week. We said: “Mr Davie faces genuinely existential problems for the future health of what remains one of the UK’s truly global brands.” So, these are “genuine” existential problems, as opposed to the usual fake ones. But then they are problems for the “health” of the BBC – in other words, not for its existence, but for its wellbeing, or for the quality of its existence. Nor did we need the word “future”. If “existential” had been banned, as it should be, the sentence could have read: “Mr Davie faces serious problems for the health of what remains one of the UK’s truly global brands.”