Mea Culpa: bang a saucepan to mock Boris

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

Much ado about nothing... Boris Johnson has still to finish his biography of Shakespeare (Getty)

We said that Boris Johnson “has been paid a huge advance to write a biography of Shakespeare and is regularly mocked for still not having submitted it, more than half a decade beyond the deadline”. I think we should have said he is “frequently” mocked, lest we give the impression that the entire nation turns out on its doorstep at 8pm on Fridays to bang a saucepan in derision directed at the former prime minister.

All-seeing sea: In one of our reports of the deaths off Bournemouth beach, we said: “The tides at Bournemouth see two highs and two lows in a 24-hour period.” As Philip Nalpanis commented, this is a curious example of an inanimate phenomenon, the tide, “seeing”.

It wasn’t even as if there was anything particularly interesting to see: most tides all over the world have two highs and two lows a day, because that is what the moon does. There are exceptions, such as Southampton Water, just along the coast from Bournemouth, because the tide comes in from two directions around the Isle of Wight. Which is irrelevant, although no more so than the information about the frequency of high and low tides at Bournemouth in the first place.

Criminal baroness: We all know what was meant, but our description of Baroness Hallett’s “razor-sharp criminal mind” was unfortunate. We could have referred to her “razor-sharp criminal lawyer’s mind”. It would have been a little more cumbersome, but as Gavin Turner pointed out, everyone knows what a criminal lawyer is, and that they are not a criminal.

Push back: An old pedantry favourite in our report about British Airways being fined by the US authorities for failing to pay refunds quickly enough for flights cancelled during the pandemic. The company “said it had ‘acted lawfully at all times’ after being hit with the 1.1 million US dollar (£878,000) fine on Thursday, and refuted the claims”.

We meant that BA “rejected” the claims: “refuted” is usually used to mean “disproved”. In fact, “refute” originally meant refuse or reject, so pedants of the 1540s would have objected to the newfangled sense of “overthrow by argument or countervailing proof” that became fashionable then. Even so, it is the pedants of the 2020s that we have to worry about, so we should use “reject” or “rebut” instead.

We also had our money in an unconventional format. I think our style should be “$1.1m” for the amount in dollars, and I am not sure we need to convert it into pounds as our readers are familiar enough with the approximate rate. But if we did need to convert it, £880,000 would have been accurate enough – the same number of significant digits as the original.

Sharp money: In an article about tourism in France, we referred to “show-stopping cuisine at a still-affordable price point”, which I thought was a bit much. But it wasn’t the only time in the past week that we used what I thought was a stray piece of linguistic litter from management-school jargon. We said in a review of hair conditioner that we didn’t need much of one of the products, “which is a big plus considering its price point”. In both cases, we could have just said “price”.