Mea Culpa: Exponential growth in the use of existential ought to be reversed

Long posh words and a homophone emergency in this week’s Independent

Rudy Giuliani angrily addresses the Republican convention (Getty)

We are used to “exponentially” being used to refer to something that has increased a lot. It is borrowed from mathematics, in which it means that the rate of increase of something is increasing.

Now, in the opening of a report on Tuesday from Cleveland, Ohio, we used it just to mean “very”: “Midway through his exponentially angry speech – he looked fit to bust a blood vessel – Rudy Giuliani told Republicans at their convention on Monday night that he was ‘sick and tired of the vicious, nasty campaign against Donald Trump’.”

We don’t have to be purist about words changing their meaning to think that this doesn’t really make sense.

Vogue: A similar word that is in vogue is existential. There must be something about multi-syllabic words beginning with ex- and ending in -tial that makes them sound intellectual. It was used twice in our pages about the European Union this week, and once about the Labour Party.

The word is usually paired with crisis, and is considered a posh way of saying that the institution concerned may cease to exist. On Tuesday we described the EU as an “economic bloc which is certainly big and prosperous, but which is also pretty stagnant, and prone to periodic existential crises”.

I don’t think that is true: the existence of the EU has not been threatened before and isn’t really threatened now. We could have simply deleted the word.

In the app edition of The Independent on Thursday we said: “The EU cannot give this deal to the UK because it would represent an existential threat to the EU itself.” Again, we could have lost the word without losing any of the sense.

Finally in an editorial on Wednesday, we wrote of “the insecurities and near-existential state of depression that most of the parliamentary party, and the Labour movement beyond Westminster, finds itself paralysed by”. Again, just get rid of it. “The insecurities and state of depression...” reads better. While we are at it, we could fix the inelegant sentence ending thus: “...by which most of the parliamentary party, and the Labour movement beyond Westminster, finds itself paralysed.”

Homophone emergency: We had a headline on the letters page in the app edition of The Independent on Sunday: “Theresa May must apply the emergency break to immigration.” The letter itself referred to an “emergency brake”. This was a common confusion at the time David Cameron was trying to renegotiate the terms of the UK’s membership of the EU, brake and break being an unusual homophone that works both ways.

The original sense was that of a brake on a car or train, applied to slow down immigration at a time when the stresses caused by it constituted an emergency. But the other meaning also makes sense, as a temporary interruption to the flow of immigration.

However, you wouldn’t normally “apply” that kind of break, and anyway the headline ought to reflect the text to which it refers.