Mea Culpa: the campaign against iconic cliches is making progress

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

Paul Pogba – ‘a footballer, m’lud’ (AFP/Getty)

The campaign against “icon” and “iconic” is making progress. We use them less than we used to. But this week we still managed an “iconic evolution”, a “cultural icon” and an “iconic British wallpaper and textile house”.

The first was in an article about the decline and survival of the music album. Talking about the Sixties we said: “The decade witnessed the iconic evolution of rock music…” It is curious enough to have an abstraction witnessing things, but if we are to let that through, we could still have just deleted the “iconic”.

The cultural icon was Paul Pogba – a footballer, m’lud. We went on to explain why he was significant: he is “a prominent, rich, young black Muslim in a society that has traditionally treated him with suspicion”. No need for “icon”, then, confusing things by being, originally, a devotional Christian painting used ceremonially in the Byzantine and other eastern churches.

Finally, we described GP & J Baker as an “iconic British wallpaper and textile house”. Again, we explained what it was – founded in 1884 and holder of the Queen’s Royal Warrant since 1982 – so there was no need for the adjective.

“Iconic” is usually a way of saying “famous”, which we should avoid because if the reader has heard of rock music in the Sixties, or Pogba, or GP & J Baker, they don’t need to be told. And if they haven’t, and most readers won’t have heard of GP & J Baker, telling them that it is known to those in the know adds insult to ignorance.

Pedantry and beyond: I am all for pedantry, but it is possible to go too far. A reader wrote to ask if the battle for “such as” is lost. He objected to a sentence in our report of an opinion poll that found most voters say there should be a general election if Theresa May is replaced as Conservative leader.

The article referred to “would-be challengers like Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid and Michael Gove”. Surely, our correspondent wrote, it should be “such as” rather than “like”.

It is true that the possible candidates are not “similar to” Johnson, Hunt, Javid and Gove, they are those four people (plus several more).

But that is how language works: “like” is used in English to mean “such as”. This is standard usage, and there is no ambiguity, so insisting on “such as” is mere logic chopping.

Scaling the depths: We had a few instances of “large-scale” this week, as we usually do. It is an inelegant way of saying “big”.

Roundabout descent: We slipped up in an article about new evidence that “casts doubt on Richard III’s guilt over the princes in the Tower”. We reported that a DNA test might confirm that the bones in an urn in Westminster Abbey are those of the princes. If so, this would strengthen the allegation that Richard III had them murdered.

We said that the DNA sample had been “obtained from a recently identified direct descendant of the princes’ maternal grandmother”. As Amol Rajan, the former editor of The Independent, was fond of pointing out, there is no such thing as an “indirect descendant”. We just meant a “descendant”.

We compounded the error in the sub-headline in which we described this mystery person as a “linear descendant”. There is no other kind.