Mea Culpa: the alarming frequency with which we misuse ‘regularly’

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Our report on the Lib Dems’ Luciana Berger could have used more precise language (AFP/Getty)

One of these days I will accept that the language has changed and that “regularly” does indeed mean “frequently” or “routinely”. But today is not that day. We used it many times last week, and in most cases I thought it was the wrong word.

In a report about EU rules on labelling Israeli products, we said the EU “regularly notes that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law”. We did not mean that the European Commission issues a press release on the third Wednesday of each month: we meant “repeatedly”.

Similarly, in a report of the death of Frank Dobson, we said he would “regularly point to the lack of funding available to the NHS, even as he served as health secretary”. Again, we meant he did it so often that it was expected of him.

And in an interview with Luciana Berger, now the Liberal Democrat candidate in Finchley and Golders Green, we referred to her struggle against antisemitism in the Labour Party, writing: “She says the abuse was regularly dismissed by Labour members in her Liverpool Wavertree constituency.” There we needed a word such as “invariably”.

We almost invariably do.

Happy ending: A headline in the “news in brief” section of the Daily Edition last week said: “Vegan woman who saved pig from farmer has animal seized by RSPCA.” Thanks to Gordon Whitehead who pointed out that this was quite wrong, as the article itself made clear. The woman was asked to leave her flat by her landlord because pets were not allowed; so she asked the RSPCA for help and the charity took the pig away “with the owner’s consent”. What seemed from the headline to be a horror story turned out to be the plot of next year’s John Lewis advert.

Just because: Guy Keleny, my predecessor as author of the Mea Culpa column, used to say: “Any sentence containing the words ‘the fact that’ needs to be recast. It is a useless sound, as of grinding gears, emitted by a brain desperately trying to work out how to get to the next bit of the sentence.”

He was right, although usually we get away with it – we use it a lot and mostly the reader’s eye slides over it harmlessly. But sometimes the engine stalls. Last week, we reported that the attempt to end the embargo on diamonds from the Central African Republic was unlikely to succeed: “But the fact that Russia was pushing it meant it would attract ‘some support’.” Guy would probably have recast it thus: “But it would attract ‘some support’ because Russia was pushing it.”

Whenever we are tempted to write “the fact that”, we should ask if “because” would work better.