Mea Culpa: a peek at peak pique confusion

Our weekly self-critical look at stylistic and grammar glitches, by John Rentoul

The film set where the fatal shot was fired (AP)

In an article about the death of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer, we said that the person in charge of the guns on the film set was the daughter of a Hollywood firearms expert, and that “her interest in following her father’s footsteps had only piqued in recent years”. Thanks to Sue Alexander for pointing out this unusual confusion between something that piqued her interest, and her interest having peaked.

Pique, from the French for “to prick”, means to stimulate interest or curiosity, but it would usually be used in the form “had only been piqued”, whereas this sentence sounds as if we meant to say that her interest “had only peaked” in recent years.

Deep fried: The language is always changing, and I admit I hadn’t noticed it, but we are in the middle of a transition in our cricket coverage from “batsman” to “batter”. We currently use both words interchangeably. As someone who became used to chair and spokesperson when I worked for the New Statesman in the 1980s, the change seems natural, if not overdue, to me.

However, it leads to problems in headlines such as this on our sports pages last week: “England batter Bangladesh in dream start to World Cup.” Thanks to Philip Nalpanis, who suggested it might be time to retire “batter” as a verb in cricket reporting. He thought “England thump Bangladesh…” would have a more satisfying sound to it in any case.

Americanism watch: Another way that language is changing is that we copy American ways of speaking and writing. We advocate courses of action; Americans “advocate for” them. The American form may become the dominant one here, but it isn’t yet, and we should avoid distracting those readers who care about such things. We said last week that no one “expects Neville to advocate for Manchester United axing his friend Ole Gunnar Solskjaer on live television”, for example. In British English, that would be “to advocate that Manchester United axe his friend…”

Inconsistent tests: Philip Nalpanis also pointed out that we write about two kinds of tests for coronavirus: lateral flow and PCR. But we never do it the other way round: we don’t call them LFTs (or LFDs, lateral flow devices, as they are properly known) and polymerase chain reaction tests. My theory is that no one knows how to pronounce polymerase (puh-LIM-eriz, according to the Oxford dictionary).

Maths experts: My campaign against “multiple”, which I think is an ugly word for “several”, is not going very well. We said that travel companies “offering multinational itineraries face multiple problems”, which is too many multis for me. And we said: “The UK faces another ‘lockdown Christmas’ unless more stringent measures to combat Covid-19 are implemented immediately alongside the vaccine rollout, according to multiple experts.” They sounded as if they might be experts in multiples.

“Several” is a perfectly good word, and the Oxford dictionary definition is basically poetry: “More than two but not many.” We should use that instead.