Mea Culpa: living, breathing and experiencing

John Rentoul reviews questions of usage and style in last week’s Independent

Ed Sheeran can call his albums anything he likes, but misplaced use of division and multiplication in these pages is frowned upon (PA Wire)

We used the phrase “lived experience” a couple of times in the past week. We said that shoplifters “have their own lived experience”, which “tells them that the chance of being nicked is vanishingly small”; and that someone “spoke from a position of lived experience”.

I suppose this is an attempt to emphasise that a person has been through something themselves, and that they are not making assumptions about what others might feel. I don’t think it works. Experience is by definition personal, and “lived” adds nothing, except possibly to irritate the reader. As the Cybermen say: “Delete. Delete. Delete.”

Multiply and divide: We used the word “multiple” 22 times in the past seven days, a computer search tells me. In every case we could have said “several” and in a couple of cases we could have deleted it altogether. In a recapitulation of the Yom Kippur war, for example, we said “multiple assaults came from Arab states led by Egypt and Syria”. The use of the plural should have been enough to tell the reader that there was more than one assault. Delete again.