Mea Culpa: Keeping the peace

Susanna Richards chases her own tail in last week’s Independent

Suddenly they were everywhere (Getty/iStock)

As was bound to happen when the incumbent writer of this column took a break from his campaign against the improper use of “amid”, our deployment of this tiny yet seemingly apocalypse-proof word has proliferated once again. The cat is away, as the saying goes, and though I am not he, I am yet not averse to obliterating the odd mouse in his absence.

Reader Paul Edwards wrote to alert us to the presence of one in an article about a television celebrity: “TV presenter and broadcaster Jonnie Irwin has shared a health update amid his terminal cancer diagnosis,” we wrote. There was absolutely no need for it in this context; we could simply have said “about”, or “after”. At time of writing, we have used the word 347 times in the past week, which is almost enough to fill a whole article with nothing but amids. At least that would make them easier to find and destroy.

Wrong kind of passenger: It seemed as though we were misattributing blame for the problems afflicting Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport when we reported that it had declared 2022 “a record year in terms of disappointing customers and financial losses”. Obviously we were referring to the poor experience of those using the busy international hub, but the image of its owners being terribly excited to welcome interesting visitors, only to find that they were actually just a lot of random people with suitcases, is one I will treasure.

Title case: In a world news item about a controversy involving The New York Times and author JK Rowling, we managed to confuddle readers by abbreviating the title of the newspaper in question to The Times. This isn’t our style; in fact, we proscribe it specifically on account of the existence of a British newspaper called exactly that.

US writers, of course, are perfectly entitled to use the abbreviation for their papers – and on occasion refer to the British title as “the London Times”, which always amuses me for no good reason; perhaps it’s just the Looking-Glass-world delight of seeing familiar things regarded as “the other” – but it is still important to avoid any doubt about which publication we are quoting from or discussing. Thus we abbreviate The New York Times to either the NYT or the Times (with the direct article in each case capped down and roman).

Fear the worse: We published an article in which we quoted someone saying that the recent security changes on Twitter would leave “many users worse protected”. This is a peculiar usage. “Worse” normally comes after the verb when used as an adverb, if it appears as one at all in formal writing; the usual thing is to swap it out for “less well”. But that’s not to say it’s wrong; after all, we would say that people are better protected. Still, it was changed in the article, mainly to protect our own users from tripping over it.

Clause for concern: “Consciously or subconsciously, the informal trappings of power are beginning to move towards Starmer” was our picture caption on a comment piece last week. That is a dangling modifier if ever I saw one. Trappings are never conscious of their movements, being inanimate, so we changed the adverbial clause to say “Whether he is conscious of it or not”. Neither do they move, if one is going to be pedantic about it – and one well might – but we allow personification, within reason.

Invitation only: Regular reader Julian Self wrote to castigate us for using “invite” as a noun in an article about Prince Andrew. “You can’t offer someone a verb!”, he said, and he is quite right. Language does move over time – though sometimes in the wrong direction – and it’s not unusual to see or hear the abbreviated word used instead of the proper one. I think it’s ugly, though, and given it’s incorrect, too, that’s two marks against allowing it to pass muster, and none I can think of in favour. So we changed it to “invitation”.

Stirring up trouble: “Mr Johnson knows that the Northern Ireland protocol is a matter on which it is easy to rile up dissent,” we said in an editorial about the nuisance that is the former PM. John Armitage suggested that this wasn’t quite right, correctly asserting that the Oxford dictionary defines rile as “annoy or irritate”. Stephen Hardy wondered whether our phrase was tautologous, but I don’t think it was quite that. In fact, I don’t think it was quite wrong.

The OED gives another (North American) meaning of rile, which is to “make (water) turbulent or muddy”, and I assume that is the sense in which the author intended it; I suppose a synonym would be “foment”. It’s not how it’s used in British English, though, and it clearly riled some of our readers, so we should probably have changed it to something else. Our aim is never to dismay or discomfit... at least, not with our language.