Mea Culpa: Friendly fire

Susanna Richards intercepts some errors in last week’s Independent

The troubles of passengers stuck at Dubai international airport (file image) cannot be overstated (Netherlands Institute for Art History)

We excelled ourselves last week in an article discussing the fortunes of Manchester United football club, in which we managed to combine a striking mixed metaphor with a classic misspelling. “Ten Hag remains on a knife edge, hanging by a thread,” we wrote, evoking an image of the kind of peril one might encounter in a book of adventure stories for boys. We continued: “The P45, crucially, remains in Ratcliffe’s draw, under his marathon medal.” That should have been “drawer”, of course, but I expect our writer was too caught up in the excitement to worry about spelling. Thanks to Roger Thetford for telling us about it.

It is always dangerous to make a mistake in any given article in The Independent because the chances are that whoever happens to be writing this column that week will read the rest of it. It’s a bit like having a medical scan for an existing condition, only to be told that there was an “incidental finding” and you now have something else, too. Thus it became apparent that we had erred once more in the Man United article, this time by way of tautology. “Coventry were playing the badge rather the current, chaotic United incumbent, but they still had their moments in the first half,” we wrote. We did not need to say “current” as that is what “incumbent” means, so back in the draw of spare words it should have gone.

Come follow the banned: In a report about Penny Mordaunt’s views on missile defence systems and the like, we said: “The former defence secretary’s comments come following another precarious week for relations between Israel and Iran.” There are a number of ways to join the two parts of an article in which the context of an incident is explained beneath the main story; probably the most frequent device used by our writers is to begin the second part with “It comes as …”, which means “Just before that happened, this happened, in case you didn’t know.” We might instead use the phrase “It follows …”, which means roughly the same thing, but we shouldn’t try to use both at the same time. The sentence was duly simplified.