Mea Culpa: Words that may or might be problematic

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

World Cup winners Joe Root and Johnny Bairstow, no untried ingenues, made life prob-, er, difficult for New Zealand last Sunday (Getty)

Whenever I try to ban a word, someone, somewhere can usually suggest an example of when its use might be justified. But I have yet to come across a sentence containing the word “problematic” that could not be improved by changing it to a sentence that doesn’t contain the word “problematic”.

This week, in a report on the news that the death rate from drug abuse in Scotland is now worse than in the US, we wrote about “problematic drug users”. A simple “problem drug users” would have sufficed, although, given that we were talking about the small number of addicts who inject themselves publicly in Glasgow city centre, any adjective was superfluous.

In a comment article on gender-neutral school uniform, meanwhile, the author paused half way through to say, “there is a second, more problematic aspect to this question”. I think the word “difficult” is better here.

“Difficult” would also have been better in a travel article, in which we said “making money from flying to Russia itself has always been problematic” – although “hard” would have been even shorter.

May be a problem: We had a grammatically curious headline on a crime story this week: “Public schoolboy may not have been cleared of murdering friend if he were black, MP suggests”. That should have been “might”, because it happened in the past, and “may” suggests that we don’t know the outcome of the case. Thanks to Lloyd Bracey for pointing this out.

There are two other problems with this headline that make it hard to understand (you might almost say it is problematic). One is that it has a “not” in it – negatives always complicate things – and it is terribly easy to mistype “not” as “now”.

The other is the phrase “if he were black”, which I think is confusing. The whole thing needs to be rewritten – something like this: “Public schoolboy might have been convicted of murdering friend if he had been black, MP suggests”.

Cricket appeal dismissed: Apparently there was a cricket match last weekend, and, in one of the many things we wrote about it, we said: “Neither Root nor Bairstow are untried ingenues.” A reader got in touch to say he thought an ingenue was an innocent young woman. That is the usual meaning, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be unisex. It is from the French, with an accent, so a man is an ingénu, but in English I think “untried ingenus” would look odd.

I would also say that “neither/nor” is singular, and would write “neither Root nor Bairstow is an untried ingenue”, but I don’t think that matters either.

Dead good: Finally, all praise to whoever wrote this headline on an article about green burials: “How eco-friendly funerals are the only way to go.”