Mea Culpa: How one word cut a headline about knife crime to pieces

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

‘It’s worse than decimated, centurion... we’ve lost at least 69 per cent of the cohort’ (Downloaded from image.net)

My campaign to abolish the word “decimate” has not yet succeeded. It originally meant “reduce by one tenth” but, because it sounds a bit like “destroy” and “exterminate”, it is widely used to mean “dramatically reduce”.

This is particularly awkward for some readers when we use it of a percentage reduction that is not 10 per cent. We said last week, for instance, “Youth services ‘decimated by 69 per cent’ in less than a decade amid surge in knife crime, figures show”.

Thanks to John Schluter for questioning the use of “decimated”, but pretty much everything about this headline is terrible. The d-word is in quotation marks because it was used by an MP commenting on the figures, although she didn’t mention the 69 per cent.

Then we had “in less than a decade”, which is vague. The story is that spending on youth services has been cut by 69 per cent since 2010. Nine years is an odd period, but there is nothing wrong with “since 2010”.

Then we had “amid”, the standard journalese device for implying cause and effect without saying so. The story reported that some MPs and the chief executive of the YMCA, which runs youth clubs, claim that the reduction in spending is linked to the rise in knife crime over a similar period. We could have said that in the headline.

And finally we had “figures show”, which was redundant. We meant that the 69 per cent figure had been produced by someone. It was the YMCA, as it turned out, so we could have said, “according to the YMCA”, but that would have been a lot of capital letters for a headline and it might not have been immediately obvious to the reader what the YMCA is or why it is an authority on the subject.

However, quotation marks can be a useful device, to indicate that the source of a claim is an organisation that has an interest in the matter.

So the headline could have said something like: “MPs blame ‘69 per cent cut’ in spending on youth services since 2010 for rise in knife crime.”

Debased coinage: We used the phrase gold standard three times last week. In a report about a study that found surgery for chronic shoulder pain doesn’t work, we described randomised control trials as “the gold standard for clinical evidence”.

In a review of anti-allergy pillows we said the seal of approval from Allergy UK and the British Allergy Foundation was the “gold-standard status”. And in an article about the Brithdir Mawr commune in Wales, we said it “may set the gold standard” for sustainable living.

The problem with the actual gold standard – the policy of making paper money convertible into gold – is that it was a disaster that intensified the misery of the Depression after the crash of 1929.

Still, perhaps the use of the metaphor should be encouraged as a reminder of the frailty of humanity’s attempts to fix permanent benchmarks for quality.