Mea Culpa: an archaic spelling in St George’s Chapel

John Rentoul on questions of style and the use of language in last week’s Independent

The Land Rover that drove Prince Philip’s coffin to St George’s Chapel (Reuters)

This came up the last time we wrote about the royal family in St George’s Chapel at Windsor: it must have been one of those weddings. A reader has complained that we said the Queen would be sitting in the quire for the funeral of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. Did this mean she would be sitting on a 20th of a ream of paper, we were asked.

As we discovered last time, quire is an archaic spelling of choir, and old churches sometimes use it, including St George’s Chapel. Isn’t it choaint?

Irritating tic: We have had an uptick in the number of uses of “uptick” recently, and Richard Hanson-James is ticked off about it. “Navalny’s poisoning and jailing have certainly provoked the largest uptick in Russian protest sentiment since 2011-12,” we said, while elsewhere reporting on “a dermatologist who has seen an uptick in younger patients requesting Botox in the past few years”. Let us hope we soon see a downtick in this trend.

Anti-hyphenated: We had an unusual double hyphen in an article about regulating cryptocurrency trading: “Watchdogs, for which the whole industry is a headache, have largely focused on anti-money-laundering on the one hand, and warning consumers on the other.” Thanks to Roger Thetford for pointing it out. He praised it as obviously better than “anti-money laundering”, which would be the washing of anti-money, but I think the sentence needed to be recast: “stopping money laundering” would have been more elegant.

Massive amount: Another reader wrote to question our report that “Japan has announced that it will release into the sea more than a million tons of contaminated water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant”. Should we be using a measure of mass to describe a volume of liquid? It’s a good question, but I think tons is fine, because the reader would have to think harder about a million cubic metres. At least we didn’t try to convert it into Olympic swimming pools.

Stuck in the middle: I haven’t mentioned “amid” for two weeks now, so I am allowed to return to fighting this plague. Here are just two examples from among the 40 uses last week: “The GMB union has condemned the ‘mass sackings’ of engineers on Wednesday amid a long-running dispute with Centrica over pay and conditions.” That is not “amid”, it is “in”.

In a report on the reaction to the shooting of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis, we said that some people had questioned the decision of the police chief to use rubber bullets to disperse protesters, “with the city already tense amid the trial of one of four officers accused of the murder of George Floyd last summer”. Amid the trial? What is wrong with normal English, “because of the trial”?

The worst thing is that “amid” is a perfectly good and useful word in the right place, such as in an article about psychedelic drugs being used to treat depression. We said one drug creates a state of disorder in the brain, allowing every part to communicate with every other. “Amid the chaos something magical happens: the frantic neural crosstalk opens ways out of those deep dark grooves where depression lurks.” That is more like it.