Mea Culpa: hands up who really knows what an arthropod is

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

Arthropod, arachnid? Or can we get away with ‘insect’? (Kenneth Chin)

In a story about Jamie Thorpe, who takes amazing photographs of small creatures, we described spiders as insects. Mick O’Hare, who writes for New Scientist (as well as for The Independent), pointed out that they are not. I don’t feel strongly about it, and neither does Mr Thorpe: we quoted him calling them insects too. It gets complicated if you have to refer to arachnids, insects and other arthropods, and patronising if you go the other way and call them bugs and creepy-crawlies, so I think occasionally using “insects” to refer to them all is fine.

Might is right: In the report of the Foreign Office being criticised for its handling of the evacuation of Kabul, we said: “Ministers were accused of having a ‘total absence of a plan’ for Afghans who supported the British mission, despite knowing for 18 months that the evacuations may be necessary if the US withdrew its troops.” That should be “might”, as Paul Edwards pointed out, because it is all over now.

Whale-pigeon: Paul also mentioned the charming story of a humpback whale that gave a “thank you” sign to its human rescuers. Only the story did not say what the sign was. “Was it a stream of bubbles forming the word ‘Gracias’?” he asked. Or a slap of the tailfin, perhaps? Also, the past tense of “dive” in British English is “dived”, not “dove”. In British English that’s a kind of pigeon.