The British government repeatedly said that the algorithm designed to make up exam grades for pupils who weren’t able to take them was “robust”, shortly before abandoning it because it was apparently broken. So how robust is an official claim that something is robust?
To call things “robust” is arguably a kind of crypto-machismo, which is to be expected from the particular men currently misgoverning us. It originally referred to bodily sturdiness, as in William Caxton’s 1490 translation of the prologue to Virgil’s Aeneid, when the hero proves his “robuste puyssaunce” by yanking a tree out of the ground. It derives from the Latin robustus, literally “made of oak”, and thereafter strong or firm.
In English, “robust” could thereafter be applied to intense colours or smells, loud voices, solid objects, and latterly to reliable statistical tests or computer algorithms, unlike the one just abandoned.
The most pertinent sense of “robust” in the present context, however, is that euphemistically meaning coarse, rude, or uncaring. In 1817 the mathematician Charles Hutton expressed his horror of “robust manners” and “vulgar ideas”. In that sense at least, everything Boris Johnson and chums do is as robust as anyone would wish.
• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.
