Mea Culpa: how many football fields or London buses in Delaware?

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Area code: using a US state as a point of reference seems a little cryptic (iStock)

In Science in Brief in the Daily Edition we reported the discovery of a possible volcanic crater in Laos, and referred to “a Delaware-sized plateau near the Mekong River”. Mick O’Hare, who brought it to my attention, said: “I’m not sure how many Waleses, football fields or London buses that is, though.”

We have done this before. A couple of years ago we described an iceberg about to break off from Antarctica, covering 2,000 square miles, as “nearly the size of Delaware”. This probably doesn’t mean that much even to our US readers, but as a UK-based news organisation we should have avoided it. The state of Delaware is interesting: it takes its name from a river named after a British colonist with the Anglo-Norman surname De La Warr. But few people have a good idea how big it is.

The best British comparators are West Sussex and Warwickshire (1,988 and 1,978 square miles, respectively), but the more you think about it, the less meaningful such analogies become. Let us just say 2,000 square miles and be done with it.

Driven mad: Languages change, and there are some trends that start in America and spread to Britain. Sometimes we complain about them, only to have it pointed out that the American form is older – this applies to “gotten”, which I like, and which is increasingly accepted in informal British English.

I am sure there is someone out there who will tell me that Chaucer used “anymore” as one word, but I don’t like it. The Oxford dictionary describes it as “North American”, which is good enough for me. And I know it is a losing battle. Last week, for example, we used it as two words 14 times and as one word six times, which included Matthew Norman’s column, in which he said Harry and Meghan are “mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore”.

Eventually, the one-word form will prevail. But I intend to go down fighting, mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

Cheap shot: I may have become sensitised to the word “affordable” because it is one of the glib platitudes of housing policy. We reported last week on homes that were classified as “affordable” because they were sold at 80 per cent of the market price. All that does is prompt further questions: how are the people allowed to buy at reduced prices selected? Who pays for the 20 per cent of price forgone? Why call them “affordable” when there are large numbers of people who still cannot afford them?

But the word is everywhere, especially in our product reviews. Usually, this looks like a way of avoiding the word “cheap” because it might imply low quality. But we went too far in a review of coats when we wrote about a “fantastic” coat “at an affordable price point”.

And in a review of speakers, we wrote about a pair costing £749 that used technology usually found in more expensive devices “at a more affordable price”. Excuse me. Just a factual “at a lower price” would do.