Mea Culpa: caught on the hop

Questions of style and language in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

Saturday 18 February 2023 19:51 GMT
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Shock treatment: one of our writers nearly killed off Machine Gun Kelly in a review
Shock treatment: one of our writers nearly killed off Machine Gun Kelly in a review (AFP via Getty)

We carried a fine headline last weekend: “‘Most wanted’ one-legged crime boss arrested in Thailand after years on the run.” That is a good equal-opportunity use of the idiomatic phrase “on the run”; there is no reason why it shouldn’t apply to someone who is differently abled. And only a pedant would point out that the phrase “most wanted” implies a league table of one-legged crime bosses, some of whom are more urgently sought by the authorities than others.

Hair-raising performance: In a review of Machine Gun Kelly – he is an American rapper noted for his “genre duality across alternative rock and hip-hop”, m’lud – we wrote: “Fans noticed that at one point during the concert, the 32-year-old’s hair stuck straight up, leading many to speculate that he had been electrocuted.” As he was still alive at the end of the concert, Iain Boyd suggested that this was the wrong word to use.

“Electrocute” was invented at about the same time as the electric chair, in the late 19th century, by merging “electro” and “execute”, although modern dictionaries note that it can be used to mean injure, as well as kill, by electric shock. Even so, as MGK appeared unharmed, we should have said that the speculation was that he had had an electric shock. There ought to be a word in English that means “had an electric shock”, but there isn’t.

Heresy news: In “World News In Brief” we reported: “At least 50 people have been arrested in Pakistan after a mob stormed a police station and killed a man suspected of blasphemy while he was in custody.” The word order suggests that the victim offended the mob – he was accused of desecrating a copy of the Quran – while he was in the police station. We changed it to: “At least 50 people have been arrested in Pakistan after a mob stormed a police station and killed a man who was in custody on suspicion of blasphemy.”

Transformation: In a report about Constance Marten, the woman who has fled with her boyfriend and baby, we quoted her father: “I urge Constance, once more, to find the courage to turn herself into the police.” That was one of those instances where “in” and “to” need to be two separate words, because he was not asking her to become a police officer.

Incoming: We said on Monday: “Unilever has been taking all sorts of flack from its shareholders in recent times.” That should have been “flak”, which is the German word for anti-aircraft fire; “flack” is dated US slang for a publicity agent. Thanks to Roger Thetford for pointing it out.

Campaign update: I continued my campaign against “multiple”, as an inexplicably fashionable alternative to “several”, only last week, but Paul Edwards has drawn my attention to another example in a report of the discovery of fossils of giant penguins: “The largest flipper bones belong to a penguin that tipped the scales at 154 kg – multiple times heavier than a modern-day emperor penguin.”

Still, my tenacious pursuit of this stylistic preference does mean that I am not going on about “amid”. Not this week, anyway.

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