Mea Culpa: through an ash cloud, darkly

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

Saturday 10 December 2022 21:30 GMT
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Mount Semeru sends clouds of ash a long way into the air
Mount Semeru sends clouds of ash a long way into the air (EPA)

It is hard to work out exactly how this could have happened, but we ended up with a remarkable case of spurious precision in a report of the eruption of a volcano in Indonesia. “The eruption led to thick columns of ash spread over 49,212ft (15km) into the sky, according to Japan’s Meteorology Agency,” we wrote. Thanks to Roger Thetford and Richard Thomas for drawing my attention to this sentence.

First, the ash was not “spread over” a distance. If we were reporting how far it spread, we would have used a unit of area, such as a square mile. What we were reporting was that the ash shot upwards, in approximately a straight line, into the sky. Fifteen kilometres is a long way, and it doesn’t really need to be converted into other units for the reader to understand that. Yet we gave the distance first in feet, and to five significant digits. The ash went up not 49,211 feet, or 49,213, but 49,212.

Some of what happened here is discernible through the cloud of debris. The Japanese Meteorology Agency does indeed use feet, which is conventional in the fields of weather, atmosphere and air travel. Only it uses feet in round thousands or, mostly, tens of thousands. What the agency actually said was that the plume of ash reached a height of 50,000ft.

It would seem that someone converted 50,000ft into 15km, which is sensible for a lay audience familiar with metric measurements, but that the 15km was then converted back into feet, this time with absurd precision.

We should have used miles, anyway, as the unit of distance most familiar to British readers. Fifty thousand feet is about nine and a half miles, so we could have said the ash went 10 miles up into the sky. Which is stratospheric.

Route and branch: We had a confusion between words that sound alike in an article about Keir Starmer saying he could not “see the circumstances” in which Jeremy Corbyn will stand as a Labour MP at the next election. “It’s another shot across the bough in the war between the current Labour leadership and the ideological foundations of the Labour Party,” the article said.

That has been changed to “shot across the bow”. It is one of many boat-based metaphors in the English language, dating from a time when seafaring was more central to people’s lives than it is today. A shot across the bow, the front end of a boat, is a warning shot in naval warfare.

Um, just one: The Strep A infection is caused by bacteria, and just one is called a bacterium. So when we reported that a secondary school student fell victim to “an infection caused by the bacteria”, it wasn’t wrong, as lots of them would have been involved, but we could have rephrased it to say that they fell victim to “the bacterial infection”.

Start again: Apparently England did well at cricket, and we referred to Ben Stokes “adding this win to his resume”. That is both an Americanism and contrary to our policy on accents, which is to get rid of them except where they change the meaning of a word, such as rosé, exposé … and résumé. We could, as John Schluter suggested, have said “CV” instead. But that might have needlessly distracted our US readers. Perhaps a different analogy was needed, such as a trophy cupboard.

Ashes to ashes: In a report of the death of Jet Black, the Stranglers drummer, we said that a representative had confirmed that he “passed away” peacefully. That may have been what the representative said, but we weren’t quoting them directly and our style is to say “died”. We assume that our readers are strong enough to manage without euphemism.

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