Mea Culpa: a confusing case of Covid

Olivia Fletcher minds our language in last week’s Independent

Queen guitarist Brian May recently came down with a bout of Covid-19 (Getty)

A news story we wrote last week highlighted how choosing the right language can be a bit of a minefield.

In our article “Scientists discover first-ever ‘true’ millipede with over 1,000 legs”, we said the creature was found in a “minefield” in Australia. A minefield is an area planted with hidden explosive mines. As friend of this column Philip Nalpanis kindly pointed out, what we meant to say was that the millipede was found in a mining area, where mining takes place.

Bite the dust: When Queen guitarist Brian May revealed he caught Covid, Paul Edwards noticed we wrote: “Brian May has said he ‘perhaps made the wrong decision’ to attend a mask-free social gathering after catching Covid-19”, implying he went to his friend’s birthday lunch despite knowingly testing positive for the virus.

We thought it best to change the headline to: “Brian May says he ‘perhaps made the wrong decision’ to attend gathering where he thinks he caught Covid-19.”

Viral nouns: Speaking of the virus, we wrote “Covid pandemic” at least three times in our copy last week. Here’s one example in a news report about sick pay: “Rachel Reeves has called on Rishi Sunak to ‘get a grip’ and act urgently to strengthen sick pay as the country faces a new wave of the Covid pandemic.”

By now can we not assume our articles about the pandemic refer to coronavirus and not, say, the Spanish flu? I think so. “Covid pandemic” seems like a cumbersome way of saying “pandemic”. For brevity’s sake, we should omit “Covid” and let “pandemic” do all the work by itself. Unless, of course, we are writing about a different pandemic. In which case, we should specify which one.

Lost distinctions: In a story about the severity of the Omicron variant, Paul Edwards also brought our attention to the following sentence: “Responding to the Imperial study, several scientists urged the need to reduce social contact in the coming weeks – despite reticence on behalf of political leaders to once again mandate that people do so over the Christmas period.”

Firstly, the use of “on behalf of” doesn’t quite make sense. “On the part of” would work better. “The former means, roughly, ‘for’, while the latter means, equally roughly, ‘by’. I don’t know why this distinction is being lost, so that meaning has to be inferred rather than decoded,” Paul pointed out.

And secondly, “reticence”, meaning to not reveal one’s thoughts readily, should be “reluctance”, meaning an unwillingness to do something.

That’s enough: Useless “thats” are my pet peeve, and I spotted so many of them lurking in our copy last week I lost count.

In an article about Piers Corbyn in our Daily Edition, we wrote: “The force said that the arrest related to a ‘video posted online in which people were encouraged to burn down MPs’ offices’.” And in another instance, we said: “Furious Tory MPs have said that Boris Johnson must show ‘humility’ in the wake of the devastating by-election loss in North Shropshire.”

After a verb of attribution (such as “said”), the sentence is more concise and usually still makes sense when “that” is omitted. As Tory MP Steve Baker said when he kicked Nadine Dorries out of a WhatsApp group last week: “Enough is enough”. Down with rogue “thats”.