Mea Culpa: getting ‘systemic’ out of our system

In a report of the prosecution of a German man aged 100, who had been a prison guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, we said that 20,000 people had been killed there, including by “forced labour, medical experiments and systemic extermination”. John Harrison wrote to say that he thought we meant “systematic” rather than “systemic”, and I agree with him.

Systematic means purposeful, according to a plan, whereas systemic means relating to a system. Systemic has been used a lot recently to describe the way in which systems or procedures can be racist in effect, sometimes without racist intent on the part of an individual.

It is rather confusing to apply a word commonly used in that sense to the Nazi genocide, especially when this case concerns the alleged culpability of the person who is the subject of the story.

To the lifeboats: Nigel Farage scored a striking own goal by criticising the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for doing its job of saving lives, thus prompting a wave of donations. We had a headline: “RNLI sees 2,000% daily increase in donations after criticism of asylum rescues in Channel.”

Our style guide warns against using percentages greater than 100, and Alan Pack wrote in to remind me. The temptation for journalists is to use the most dramatic number, but this can be a barrier to understanding. I am sure most of our readers would know that this is about a 20-fold increase, but they shouldn’t be made to do the conversion.

Elsewhere we reported that a drug company had “hiked the price of some thyroid medication by more than 6,000 per cent”. In this case the increase was by a factor of 62, but it might have been easier to let the prices speak for themselves: from £4 a pack in 2006 to £248 in 2017.

How soon is now? I have so many bugbears about the use of English that some of my bugbears have bugbears on their backs. One is the phrase “any time soon”, which doesn’t mean anything different from “soon”, which itself is often evasive and unspecific. Just to make it worse, it is sometimes written “anytime soon”, as we did in a comment article about another possible Scottish independence referendum. It said that Michael Gove’s acceptance of the principle of a second referendum was “a sensible move but doesn’t mean there’ll be such a vote anytime soon”.

If we are in a hurry, “soon” will do, but “before the next general election” or “in the next few years” might be more helpful for the reader. As I have deleted “anytime” (in my mind, at least) it doesn’t matter that we have stuck two words together, but if there were a reason to use the phrase – Gove saying that Nicola Sturgeon can have a referendum any time, perhaps – I think it should be two words.

Unsympathetic: We said journalists had been unable to find “supportive evidence” for accusations against Joe Biden of sexually harassing women, in an article about Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York. This sounds like the sort of evidence that is ready to provide a shoulder to cry on: the more usual phrase would be “supporting evidence”.