Mea Culpa: existential is a word that doesn’t really need to exist

Questions of usage and style in this week’s Independent

Is Marina’s detachment from her work or from the world around her?

We used the word “existential” four times this week. There is rarely a good reason to do so, in my view.

In a review of Vampire Weekend’s new album, we said that, in the six years since their previous release, “America has tumbled into an existential well”. Does this mean the country is trapped in a deep, dark questioning of its existence? If that is what the writer means, I may have just stumbled on a better way of expressing it.

In another music review, we wrote of Marina’s “existential detachment”. This may have been something to do with “the imminent world-ending conclusion to climate change” that featured in the next sentence. But again, the meaning is not clear. Does her work exhibit a detachment induced by a fear of the end of the world? I think we should be told.

In a review of Game of Thrones, meanwhile, the meaning is clear. We said “there has been more at stake for the characters as they prepared to face an existential threat to their whole world”. In that case, the word “existential” was not needed: the “threat to their whole world” just about covers it.

Finally, in an article about Scottish politics, we referred to “parties like the Greens who regard economic growth itself as an existential threat to the planet”. Again, the word was surplus to requirements. Our meaning was clear, even if it was plainly mistaken. The planet will not cease to exist as a result of environmental degradation, even if the Green Party thinks it is a threat to the survival of the human race.

Nothing sacred: We said in an article about the bombings in Sri Lanka that “churches were desecrated to rubble”. As Philip Nalpanis pointed out, the usual form would be something like “desecrated and reduced to rubble”, because desecrate means treat a sacred place or thing with violent disrespect.

To reduce a church to rubble is to desecrate it, but it is not the disrespect that reduces it to rubble.

According to the Oxford dictionary, desecrate is a 17th-century back-formation from consecrate, to dedicate something as sacred. I didn’t know that.

In the middle of chaos: Fine use of “amid”, that staple of journalese, in one of our front-page headlines today: “Two major London stations set to close amid bank holiday disruption.” That makes it seem as if the two things are unconnected, when the whole point of the story is that one will cause the other. We could have just said: “Closure of two major London stations set to cause bank holiday disruption.” At least we didn’t call it “travel chaos”.

Uncertainty principle: Praise for another headline on our front page. We said: “Five leading Democrats ‘would beat president in 2020’, poll suggests as Barr wars intensify.” This is how opinion polls should be reported. They are sample surveys that cannot be definite about what people think at the time, let alone how voters might behave – in this case 18 months in the future.

So the word “suggests” is absolutely right, and this goes to show that it can work fine, even in a headline. The “five leading Democrats”, by the way, are Beto O’Rourke, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.