Mea Culpa: paving yet another way up a crowded mountain

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

A long queue of mountain climbers line a path on Mount Everest (AP)

What do you do with a route up a mountain? We had this headline this week: “Everest climbers try to forge new route as corpses and waste litter mountain.” I thought this was odd, because you don’t make a path on a mountain out of metal, but I couldn’t think of a verb that would be better.

In the report itself we talked of setting out to “carve” a new route to the top, which is possibly too literal. Another option would be something vague such as “make” or “establish”, so I decided “forge” was all right after all. It has a second meaning of pushing ahead, forging through a crowd (possibly a corruption of force, the Oxford dictionary speculates), which seems rather apt.

The best solution, of course, would be for people not to climb Everest, and then we wouldn’t have to worry about dead bodies, litter or what to call the finding of new ways to spoil the wilderness.

Old soldiers: One of the subtler differences between British and US English is the use of “veteran”. As Alan Robertson pointed out, in the US Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend and Democratic presidential hopeful, is described as a veteran, because he served in the US naval reserve; whereas Penny Mordaunt, the 46-year-old UK defence secretary, is not, despite being an honorary commander in the royal navy reserve. Nor is Dan Jarvis, the 46-year-old mayor of the Sheffield city region, who was a major in the army.

So I paused over a headline on a comment article about the Democratic candidates’ debate, which said: “Biden hit hard, but don’t write veteran off just yet.” Joe Biden, 76, is a “veteran” in the predominantly British English sense of the word. He didn’t serve in the military; we meant that he is old and experienced. Just as, when we described Venus Williams, 39, defeated by 15-year-old Cori Gauff on the first day of Wimbledon, as a veteran, we didn’t mean that she has served in the armed forces.

Baton charge: In an article about Janet Jackson at the Glastonbury festival, we called her a “cultural powerhouse” and said that she had recently been “conducted” into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It is quite an endearing mental image but I suspect, as Linda Calvey suggested, that we meant she was “inducted”.

Origami: All praise to whoever wrote the headline on our report of the problems delaying the launch of the Galaxy Fold: “Inside Samsung’s struggle to deliver a foldable phone – and why the future of smartphones hinges on it.”

Not only that, but we managed to keep the joke running in the standfirst – the bit underneath the headline – in which we said the boss of the company “opens up about release date delay and dismisses rumours of $2,000 device being shelved”.

For the judges awarding the prize for headline of the week, this was an open and shut case.