Mea Culpa: the glittering fabric of the constitution

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

Paparazzo in Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’ from 1960 ( Pathé/Wiki Commons)

One of the temptations of fancy writing is that we lead ourselves into using words because of what they sound like rather than what they mean. In an article about Boris Johnson last weekend we said that he “was responsible for corrupting and coruscating the fabric of Britain’s constitution”. This is fine alliteration, but as Philip Nalpanis pointed out, “coruscating” means “glittering”, so it doesn’t make much sense.

“Coruscating” has been confused for “excoriating”, taking off a layer of skin, for so long that some dictionaries now list “severely critical” as a second meaning. Even so, as long as a significant number of readers expect the original meaning, we should avoid using the word in that sense – or indeed at all.

But neither should we have substituted “excoriating”, because it is the wrong metaphor for a piece of cloth anyway. We kept it simple, which is usually better, and accused our former prime minister of “corrupting the fabric of Britain’s constitution”.

Votes for children: We reported that “the Labour leader is mulling whether to expand the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds”, which I think is a bad idea mainly because it is so blatantly in Labour’s electoral interest. But Henry Peacock thought that in British English we “mull over” things rather than just “mull” them, unless we are talking about sweetened wine. He is right that this is mostly an American usage. We could have just said “considering”.

Flights for children: We got ourselves into a tangle in reporting the rules for young people flying on their own: “American Airlines insists a passenger aged 15, 16 or 17 travelling on their own must be taken to the departure gate and remain there until the flight is airborne.” We missed out the words “the escort must” before remain, leaving the poor teenager stranded at the departure gate for ever.

Fine-tuning: We hit a bump in the road on Wednesday, with a case of spurious accuracy spotted by Iain Brodie: “An Italian pensioner who fixed a pothole after becoming frustrated by the council’s alleged lack of action has been fined nearly €900 (£782) for taking matters into his own hands and repairing the road himself.” It was “nearly” €900, so the precise conversion is irrelevant.

I tried to look up how much the fine actually was, and found that a rival news organisation had said: “An Italian pensioner who repaired a pothole near his home has been fined £775 …” That seems a sensible approach to me: not even mentioning the euro amount and making an approximate conversion into pounds. Or we could just have said €900: our readers are familiar enough with Europe’s main currency to know roughly how much that would be. No clumsy brackets, and no questions left in the reader’s mind as to what the numbers mean.

The easy life: In a comment article about Harry and Meghan’s drama in New York, we quoted a spokesperson for the pair who described the incident “in which the paparazzi is alleged to have pursued the pair”. That was changed to “the paparazzi are”. The photographer named Paparazzo in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, 1960, left his mark in popular culture and had his name turned into a plural.

Thanks to John Harrison for writing in. He also pointed out that later in the same article we said that Harry cannot expect his account to be accepted as the end of the matter “because there are so many questions that it begs”. No one can remember what “begging the question” used to mean – in logic it is the error of assuming the premise of a question – so the phrase is best avoided. We meant that there were so many questions that his account “poses” or “invites”.