Mea Culpa: terrible headline junked amid blushes
Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul
We briefly had such a bad headline last week it should have been eligible for some kind of award: “Australia junks prioritising referendum on having separate head of state amid Queen’s death.” Of all the clanging uses of “amid”, that is one of the worst I have seen. The rest of the headline was dreadful too, junking a prioritising and referring to a “separate” head of state – presumably separate from that of the UK.
As we could assume that the reader was aware of the demise of the crown, the headline was changed to: “Australia scraps plan to vote on changing head of state.” Phew.
The Australian prime minister’s retreat from his plan for a referendum on becoming a republic also featured in another article with a suboptimal headline: “Queen’s death sparks new questions in ex-colonies.” It doesn’t feel right for a death to create a spark, which is a tired metaphor anyway. Why couldn’t it just “raise” new questions?
Surplus syllablism: We reported that road closures around the Queen’s lying-in-state “will see Cycleway 3, London’s main cycle route, blockaded for the second time this year”. A blockade is like a military siege, and “blockaded” is a longer and more dramatic way of saying “blocked”. We could also have avoided “will see”, the journalistic device of attributing the power of sight to inanimate nouns, by recasting the sentence: “The closures will include Cycleway 3, London’s main cycle route, the second time it has been shut this year.”
Them, robots: In a short headline on the front page, we said: “AI ‘catastrophe’ likely unavoidable, researchers warn.” In British English, we say “probably”, but something is either unavoidable or it is not. I also have a quibble about “AI”: it is one of those abbreviations that is not quite familiar enough for the general reader. The trouble is that “artificial intelligence” is two long words, and we do not have much space for these in front-page headlines. Fortunately, “Artificial intelligence ‘catastrophe’ likely, warn researchers,” would still have fitted.
We didn’t mean to go to sea: In a News in Brief item we said: “The Thames is tidal all the way to Teddington, further west than Richmond, and 160 km (99 miles) from where the river reaches the sea.” The spurious precision of that 99 miles should have alerted us to the error. “Where the river reaches the sea” is an imprecise location in an estuary such as that of the Thames, but a glance at a map shows that it is about 50 miles from Teddington to, say, Canvey Island. Presumably someone took a figure that can be found on the internet, of 100km, which would take you well into the open sea north of Whitstable, mistook it for 100 miles, converted it into kilometres, and then converted it back to miles. Anyway, 99 miles would take you halfway across the Channel to Belgium.
Diplomatic zigzag: In a report about motor racing, we said that Ferrari were entering a new era. “It’s time to change tact.” That is a fine eggcorn, a term adopted by Geoffrey Pullum, the linguist, to describe mishearings such as eggcorn for acorn, but we meant “tack”. The racing team needs to change course, like a sailing boat tacking backwards and forwards into the wind.
Thanks to readers Steven Fogel, John Harrison, Philip Nalpanis, Mick O’Hare, Henry Peacock, Philip Talbot and Roger Thetford for writing in last week.
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