Mea Culpa: Cricket, squeezed through the rollers

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

Hung out to dry: the ins and outs of Joe Root, England captain (PA Wire)

I gather that I am fortunate to have avoided being emotionally involved in cricket. “Cricket in England was put through the ringer” in 2021, we declared in a subheadline last week. This is what happens when no one has a mangle: we no longer know what a wringer is, and the familiar metaphor becomes detached from its origins and its original spelling.

Thanks to Iain Boyd for spotting this one. A wringer (or a mangle) wrings out clothes, squeezing them between two rollers, from Old English wringan, related to Dutch wringen, squeeze or twist, and nothing to do with bells.

Do not disturb: John Schluter wrote to point out our report of “a block of flats decimated by fire”. There is never a good reason to use “decimate”, which needlessly stirs the hornets’ nest of pedantry because it originally meant cut by one-tenth. Unusually, this was a news agency report, which you would have expected to use plain English. “Destroyed” would have been fine.