Mea Culpa: ‘Problematic’ is a problematic word

Here is a sentence from an article on Wednesday about the forthcoming film, The Great Wall: “There is another less recognised way in which the heroism of Damon’s character, a European mercenary who ultimately helps to save China, could be seen as problematic.”

The trouble with “problematic” is that it is often used to suggest that something might be a problem without specifying why, or for whom. The article starts by discussing the casting of Matt Damon in the lead role, which has been criticised by people who think that a Chinese blockbuster ought to star Chinese actors. Except that Damon is playing a European mercenary in the story.

So now the author wants to suggest another criticism without actually saying it: that the film is not an accurate portrayal of China’s “history of colonialism”. You don’t say – a film not entirely historically accurate? Whatever next?

We also used the word in an editorial on Sunday about compensating households for shale-gas fracking: “Ms May no doubt has in mind her duty to keep the nation’s lights on. Given her reservations about Hinkley Point, she may feel that she has little choice but to back this huge expansion in fossil fuel consumption, but with the minimal political damage. This is problematic.”

Is it a problem for the Prime Minister, or for the nation, or for people’s whose house prices might be adversely affected? We could have simply said it is a bad idea or, as we did later on in the article, “profoundly wrong”.

We did explain what was wrong with it: buying off opponents would set a bad precedent and “institutionalise nimbyism”. So we didn’t need the obfuscation of the buzz-word “problematic”.

Asleep or just lying down? In our analysis of how the Labour Party had got itself into the worst pickle for 85 years on Thursday, we said that Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and their allies “see those rallies and street protests which are Mr Corbyn’s favourite milieu as a wake-up call to a supine parliamentary party”.

Using the phrase “wake-up call” with the strange word “supine” produces an odd effect. The first suggests that the parliamentary party is asleep, and supine means either “lying face up” or “bent backwards”. It is from the Latin supinus, bent backwards, and is usually used figuratively to mean cowardly or morally weak. That is presumably what we meant here, in which case a “rallying call” would have been better than a cliché that always reminds me of staying in a hotel in the days before mobile phones.

Sparking a furore: We struck a flint which made a gearbox crash on Wednesday. “Marco Rubio, Florida senator, sparked a backlash when he said that pregnant women with Zika should not be allowed abortions,” we reported.

That is the problem with getting used to writing “spark” to mean “cause” or “prompt”. It is a lively word popular with journalists, but it is not used that way in normal speech and can sometimes lead to mixed metaphors such as this. Backlash originally comes from the recoil between gears, although for many people it conjures up the image of a whip being cracked. What it has nothing to do with, though, is sparks.

Enviable distinction: On Tuesday we used “jealous” in what I regard as its true sense, to mean wanting to keep something (or someone) to oneself: “Parry Glasspool has apologised after he was suspended from Hollyoaks for posting a video where he wielded a knife at the camera and pretended to be a jealous girlfriend.”

That is why I keep up my campaign against jealous being used as a synonym for envious, which means wanting something (or someone) belonging to someone else.

That report also explained that Glasspool “mimiced a woman threatening her boyfriend for talking to other women”. That should be “mimicked”, to make clear that it is a hard “c” and doesn’t rhyme with iced.