Mea Culpa: American influence on a great British institution

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

The one and only Criterion Theatre in London’s West End... if there were others, we would have to rename them the Criteria Theatres (Getty)

We used an Americanism in a headline on our report of Samir Shah’s appearance at the culture select committee, where the BBC chair-designate was lightly mauled: “Gary Lineker tweets mocking Tory MPs likely broke social media guidelines, says new BBC chair.”

In British English we tend to say “probably” rather than “likely”, but we might have been better to report what Shah actually said, which is that one of Lineker’s tweets “does on the face of it seem to breach those particular guidelines”. So we could have said that a Gary Lineker tweet, singular, “mocking Tory MPs seemed to break social media guidelines, says new BBC chair”.

Fessing up: Another Americanism cropped up in the headline, “Jimmy Tarbuck admits to hit-and-run crash days after sister’s funeral,” the “to” is a feature of American English. In British English, we just admit things.

Biology lesson: We said a video of an “exceptionally rare white alligator born at a Florida park” was “absolutely extraordinary” last weekend. Well, it is unusual to see the word “born” used to describe a reptile emerging from an egg, but not totally unexpected.

Our report said: “A blue-eyed reptile slithered out of its shell and into the history books as one of the extremely rare births of a white-skinned, leucistic alligator.” As John Harrison wrote to remind us, the word we were looking for is “hatched”.

Spy drama twist: In an article about the spying charges against Danish politicians we wrote: “This accusation has been refuted by the current Danish defence secretary, Peter Hummelgaard, who said in a statement to The Independent …” As Paul Edwards pointed out, we should have said “denied”.

Although “refute” can mean “reject” or “rebut”, we should be aware that many readers are attached to its being used for the specific sense of “disprove”. That means there could be an ambiguity about which sense we intend.

XXL Christmas gear: In an article on our fashion pages about dressing up for Christmas, we said: “As always, there’s only one criteria when it comes to festive dressing: go big or go home.” If there is only one of them, we should use the singular form, criterion. But it is an unnecessarily long word anyway, so we changed it to “only one rule”.

Zombie speak: A computer search tells me that we used the dead phrase “when it comes to” 28 times last week. We even used it in a headline: “When it comes to office romance, it’s who’s on top that counts.” If we are going to do Christmas panto innuendo, we should at least have the courage of our convictions, and say: “In office romances …”

Hats off all round: I checked the front page of our website several times this week and failed to find a single “amid” in a headline. Outstanding work, everybody.

Mea maxima culpa: Last week I referred to the use of bicep as the singular of biceps as “an old pedants’ favourite”. Thanks to Alex and Anthony, who pointed out that some young pedants probably also hold it dear. That is me told. I meant “pedants’ old favourite”.