When the gods of the sports field live for ever

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

One of our reports said ‘With immortality within reaching distance ...’ (Getty)

We nearly used the word “immortality” in our front-page headline on Friday, previewing the Rugby World Cup final. The word is a cliche of sports reporting. In one of our reports of the Wales vs South Africa semi-final, we concluded: “Naturally, this wasn’t the way he would have wanted to end it: beaten by three points with immortality in their grasp.”

And in one of our previews of the final, we said: “With immortality within reaching distance, the danger lies in looking beyond the 80 minutes and envisioning life as a World Cup winner.”

What it means is “a sporting achievement that people will remember for a while”. But it is one of those overused metaphors that, if anything, diminishes the achievement it describes. And where do metaphors for superlative sporting performance go after that? Omnipotence, omniscience and the transcending of the very idea of winning and losing?

In the end we went with “England’s golden opportunity” with a photo of the (gold) cup. Simpler and more powerful, I thought.

One step beyond: We had this headline on an article about American politics: “Paul Ryan’s new conservative nonprofit is beyond tone-deaf.” This is the problem with using “beyond” as an intensifier: there isn’t really anything “beyond” tone-deafness. You can be more or less tone-deaf, but if you can’t hit a note at all there is no further to go.

What we meant was that Ryan’s American Idea Foundation was insensitive, in that Ryan’s ideas contribute more to poverty than alleviating it. Just “tone-deaf about poverty” would have been a perfectly good headline.

Outgoing: We used “upcoming” several times last week. I contend that it is not only ugly but unnecessary. We never need it. For example, in an article about the general election in Scotland: “A complicating factor may be the upcoming court case of former SNP leader Alex Salmond.” If we simply deleted “upcoming” we would lose nothing: it is obvious from the rest of the sentence that the case hasn’t happened yet.

We reported research suggesting a majority of 44 for the Conservatives “in the upcoming election”, a phrase we used half a dozen times last week – as if we were trying to distinguish it from the election after next.

The only time we needed a word – but not that word – was when we reported a threat by Donald Trump to “screw Amazon”, which we said was “according to an upcoming book by a former Trump administration official”. We could have said “forthcoming” to make clear that the book has not yet been published.