Is ‘legacy’ an insult?

‘Why can’t you have legacy tomatoes?’ asked my husband. ‘There are plenty of heritage tomatoes.’

He might well ask. Heritage tomatoes, usually called heirloom tomatoes in America, are cultivars valued for flavour lost in many modern hybrids. They include the Black Krim from the Crimea and the delicious Raf, grown in Almeria, its name an unromantic acronym from Resistente al Fusarium, since it is resistant to a fungus.

Only since the 1970s has heritage been used as a label for things of historical, cultural or scenic interest. The fashionable term was applied in 1983 to the new quango English Heritage.

Like heritage, a legacy was something we were glad to inherit. Prime ministers did not want to resign without leaving one. For David Cameron it was perhaps same-sex marriage; Theresa May’s related to modern slavery. In 2012, the Denis Law Legacy Trust was set up by the footballer, who died last week.

But a metaphorical legacy can be harmful, which is why in 2023 parliament passed ‘an act to address the legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles and promote reconciliation’. Now, less than two years later, the government wants to repeal the Legacy Act, including a clause that blocked compensation to about 400 people interned without lawful authority, including Gerry Adams.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, uses legacy as a sort of insult. In announcing that parent company Meta was getting rid of fact-checkers, he declared: ‘Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.’ The Oxford English Dictionary noted an aberrant usage of legacy in 2014. Someone in the Guardian wrote of ‘re-introducing legacy species like wolves’. The wolves weren’t leftovers; they had disappeared. Now they could be brought back from abroad like an attractive tomato.