Mea Culpa: appealing music at Glastonbury

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

One for the road... Alex Turner has sex apeel at Glastonbury with the Arctic Monkeys (Invision/AP)

In my campaign against “amid”, a word often used lazily to bolt two sections of a headline together, I advocate better and more precise words to connect two parts of a sentence, such as “despite”, “because of” and “while”. 

We managed to avoid “amid” in this headline on Wednesday but chose the wrong joining word in its place: “Boots to shut 300 stores across UK despite surge in online shoppers.” That makes it seem as if the increase in Boots’ sales through its website should help to keep its shops open, whereas the company is quite logically closing shops as their sales fall. That online sales are “surging” is good news for the company as a whole but it is no reason to keep shops open that are losing money. Here we needed an “as” in something like this: “Boots to shut 300 stores across UK as shoppers switch to buying online.”

Embittered: In a report on Formula One we wrote: “From a simple interest point of view, Reynolds and McElhenney have a huge fanbase worldwide that the Wrexham project has only exacerbated.” Thanks to Roger Thetford for pointing out we meant something like increased, enhanced or excited. “Exacerbate” means to make bitter, from the Latin exacerbare, related to acerbic (the “ex–” prefix in this case means “making”).