Mea Culpa: matter of inches out in towering achievement

Questions of the use and abuse of the English language in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

Measure for measure: as the old saying doesn’t go, give him 2.54cm and he’ll take 1.60934km (Getty/iStock)

I have to report that a complaint has been received and only partially upheld. Last weekend we reported: “A Frenchman has officially set a world record for the tallest matchstick sculpture with his 23.6ft model of the Eiffel Tower after initially being snubbed by the Guinness Book of World Records.”

A reader suggested that, since the model maker was French, we should have given the height of the tower in metres (7.19, since you ask). Despite The Independent’s generally pro-EU and modern-minded readership, however, our style is to use feet and inches for this kind of thing.

However, our style is feet and inches, not feet and decimal fractions of feet, so 23.6ft was confusing. It is the same mistake made by all the English-language reports of this story, so I assume it is in the original news agency copy. My research (a few minutes on Google) has established that the height of the tower accepted by Guinness World Records (to give the publication its more up-to-date title) is indeed 7.19 metres. This is 23ft 7in, the 0.6 of a foot being seven inches, which is what we should have put.