First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Prompted by a Prospect correspondent who wrote in to ask why we hadn’t inserted “sic” after a misuse of the word “mitigates” in a quote used by Katharine Quarmby in her piece in the new issue, I tried to see if I could think of a word or phrase more irritating than “sic” (inserted in brackets after a quotation to indicate that it is accurate, and that any error or solecism is the responsibility of the original author or speaker, not of the quoter).

As an editor, when dealing with a quote that is important to a piece of writing but that contains a mistake, it’s not always obvious what to do. Correct the mistake and thus falsify the quote? Substitute a correction in square brackets and disrupt the flow of prose? Insert an ellipsis at the offending point and arouse the suspicion of the reader?* None of these solutions is perfect. However, in almost all cases they are preferable to the horrible little “sic.”

Some writers use “sic” to hint that a typo or minor grammatical slip on the part of their source, to whom they are invariably antagonistic, represents a general brutish ignorance or a wider flaw in their argument. The blogger Oliver Kamm is often guilty of this: here he is quoting Simon Kelner, editor of the Independent, who is responding to Tony Blair’s comparison of the media to a “feral beast:”

What clearly rankles with Mr Blair is not that we campaign vociferously on certain issues, but that he doesn’t agree with our stance. What if we had backed the invasion of Iraq (like [sic], for example, we supported the interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone)?

It’s difficult to believe that had Kamm not made his intervention, a single reader would have tripped over Kelner’s (admittedly slightly artless) use of the formulation “like.” By inserting “sic,” Kamm instead draws attention to himself, simultaneously asking us to recognise his appreciation of grammatical arcania and insinuating that Kelner’s sloppy prose should discredit his argument.

Another irritating usage is to insert “sic” in a quote after a claim that the quoter believes to be so risible that it is not even worth refuting directly. Left-liberals are usually the culprits here; a recent example can be found in this Guardian piece by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, extracted from their anti-Blair polemic Fantasy Island:

Labour believes Britain is at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy and that Britain’s well-educated (sic), highly skilled (sic) and entrepreneurial (sic) workers are ready to kick German, American, Japanese and Chinese butt all round the global village.

(As an aside, Elliott and Atkinson recently responded on Prospect’s website to Julian Le Grand’s “Blair’s golden age” piece.)

Nine times out of ten, using “sic” simply draws attention away from the quote and towards the quoter, and, to this reader’s eyes at least, reduces the quoter to a smug, insecure attention-seeker, more interested in advertising their own knowledge than in adding to the sum of the world’s. So writers, think twice! — put a sock in sic.

* I first became aware of these difficulties 20 or so years ago, when as a child I enjoyed watching Jimmy White at the snooker table. In a television interview conducted after a particularly stinging defeat, White said something like, “I should have taken advantage of his mistake and I never.” The next day, reading about the match in the Daily Mail, I was surprised to see that the quote had been touched up to read “and I never did so.” Initially shocked by the Mail’s snobbery (I was only 9 years old), after a moment’s thought I realised that it would look odd if the paper had simply reprinted the quote verbatim. If these were slightly eccentric concerns for a nine year old, it was at least useful early exposure to the editorial challenges that would face me a couple of decades hence.