Word Watch: Forensic

‘The journalist Nick Wallis’s first book, The Great Post Office Scandal (2021), was a forensic account of the “multimillion-pound IT disaster that ruined hundreds of lives”, said Anne Billson in The Times’ – The Week June 2023

This little news item contains a word that, having been almost unknown to the public at large, has become ubiquitous in the present century. If you’re familiar with its technical meaning you may be happy with its appearance here. No doubt Nick Wallis’s book did indeed provide an account (I haven’t read it) of the Post Office Scandal that fitted Chambers’ definition of ‘forensic’: ‘belonging to courts of law,’ with its helpful explanation that courts of law were ‘held by the Romans in the Forum’. This clarifies how the word came into existence.

At its fundamental level, then, ‘forensic’ means ‘associated with legal procedures,’ or ‘appertaining to, or for the purposes of, the law’. But on the same day that I read the sentence in The Week, I encountered this, in another periodical: ‘Afterwards, I gave the kitchen a forensic clean, but unfortunately I forgot to empty the bin…’ Spectator 13 June 2023. Now whatever else it may imply, the word cannot, surely, be applied to the process of cleaning a kitchen, unless perhaps in a search for clues to a crime, not suggested in this instance. It seems to have acquired some metaphorical associations. But what, exactly? A second meaning, given by Merriam-Webster, is ‘Argumentative, rhetorical’, which might well apply to legal debate, indeed to any kind of debate, but hardly resonates as a description of domestic cleansing procedures.

I began to notice ‘forensic’ being used in a new all-purpose sense in about 2006, when the Literary Review in its issue of Dec/Jan 2006 /7 spoke of  ‘…two forensic descriptions of [Francis] Bacon’s garbage heap of a studio…’ This, oddly enough, has some of the association with cleaning, or clearing up a mess, that occurs in the Spectator quotation. In a review also dating from late 2006 I noticed the description of an exhibition of work inspired by the painter J. M. W. Turner that ‘… participating artists were asked to try to work forensically with their chosen drawing’. Here again it’s not at all clear what meaning is attached to ‘forensic’, though there is a common denominator, perhaps, in the idea of painstaking detail.   

It would be pleasant to think that we can retain something of the legal context in which the word originated, and something too of the association with public debate that the image of the Roman Forum calls to mind. But now that the term seems to refer to everything including the kitchen sink, I fear that will not happen.

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