Mea Culpa: g’day to the Antipodean songstress of the Oceania island

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

Do you come from the land down under?: Kylie Minogue is her country’s highest-selling female chanteuse of all time (Getty)

One of the delights of journalese, that peculiar language specific to news reporting, is the “evasm”: the “elegant variation at second mention”. Journalists go to a lot of trouble to avoid repeating themselves, with sometimes unfortunate results. The example that springs to mind is when Kylie Minogue is referred to, the second time she appears in an article, as “the Antipodean songstress”.

We tried to match that high form of the art in our “World news in brief”, when we reported that Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, had launched an inquiry into how his predecessor Scott Morrison secretly assigned himself several ministerial posts during the pandemic.

The second paragraph began: “This comes after the Oceania island’s solicitor general Stephen Donaghue said while the appointments concerning Mr Morrison were legal, they ‘fundamentally undermined’ a responsible administration.” Thanks to Mick O’Hare for spotting “the Oceania island” as a synonym for “Australia”.

That deserves some kind of award, preferably presented by Kylie Minogue, especially as there was no need to repeat “Australia” at all, and therefore no need for another way of saying the same thing, because it was clear from the context that Stephen Donaghue is the solicitor general of the country the report was about.

Part of the union: Thanks to John Harrison for drawing my attention to a caption in “Business news in brief”, which said: “A man carrying a union flag surfs around the port.” It took our intrepid reader a couple of mental retakes to realise that this was technically correct. The man in the photograph was holding the flag of Unite, the trade union, rather than the national flag of the UK.

Applying my maxim that the reader shouldn’t have to work so hard to deduce our meaning, it could have been worded: “A man surfs round the port carrying his union’s flag.”

After word: The curse of “amid” struck the front page lead headline on our website: “Putin orders another 137,000 Russian troops amid reports of heavy casualties.” That is not “amid”; that is “after”. First there were reports of heavy casualties, then Putin ordered more troops to be called up. I can see that we did not want to say “because of”, because we cannot be sure that the first thing prompted the second, but we could simply report the order of events.

Deemnation: Someone called Andrew Tate has been banned from Facebook. Thanks to our report, I now know that he is a former Big Brother contestant, and I was able to guess the reason for his ban because the report went on to say that he “has become widely known on social media for his controversial opinions, many of which have been deemed as ‘misogynistic’ towards women”.

Thanks to Paul Edwards, who pointed out that this should be “deemed” rather than “deemed as”. We could just have said “called”, but if we are to use the more judgemental “deemed”, we should say who is doing the deeming. It would make sense if it was Facebook, but we didn’t say. Then there is no need to put “misogynistic” in quotation marks, and certainly no need to say “towards women”, because that is what misogynistic means.

Where’s my quill? We used “penned” for “wrote” at least once last week. We reported that Park Heong-joon, the mayor of Busan, had “penned” a proposal to the president of South Korea that BTS, the band, should be excluded from military service so that they could perform a concert in his city. (I thought they had broken up, but that is another story.) Even if he had used a pen, this is pretentious and silly, and I am fairly sure that he would have typed it on a keyboard.