Mea Culpa: Building a bridge over troubled water

Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent, reviewed by Olivia Fletcher

A near Ms: we called the prime minister’s wife ‘Mrs Johnson’ when we should have used ‘Ms’ (PA)

Sorry to be a party pooper (it is the long weekend, after all) but I’ve spotted an error. In a story we wrote on Monday about more Partygate revelations, we mentioned the time “Mr Johnson lawfully met with siblings outdoors in his garden”. Of course he met with them outdoors. He was in his garden. Which almost certainly is outside.

Mrs the point: In the same story about Partygate, we referred to the prime minister’s wife, Carrie, as “Mrs Johnson”. This just won’t do. The Independent’s style is usually to go with “Ms” for two reasons: firstly, whether or not they are married, for the sake of simplicity; secondly, because we don’t always know their marital status. I prefer “Ms” because I think it is less sexist – but perhaps this is a matter of personal taste.

Pinning it down: Roger Thetford wrote to us this week to defend the original spelling of “linchpin”, which is now usually written as “lynchpin”. He pointed out that in a story about the Indian Premier League final, we described cricketer Shimron Hetmyer as a “middle-order lynchpin”. Either is fine according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but as this column has pointed out before, the original spelling makes more sense.

A linchpin is a pin holding a wheel on the axle of a cart. If it falls out, the wheel can work itself off the axle. “Lynch”, on the other hand, could be spelt with a “y” because it likely derives from the surname of an 18th-century lyncher in America. Both are acceptable but I think I prefer the former.

Computer glitch: We want to use this space to correct an error we made in our daily edition last week. In a story about the world’s fastest supercomputer, we said: “Exaflop or exascale computing refers to those that are able to do 1018 operations in one second”. What we should have said was “10¹⁸ ”, but when we transferred the story to our app, the formatting wasn’t picked up. Written out, this would be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or a billion billion. Which, as Roger Thetford kindly pointed out, is a bit more than 1,018.

Single-minded: In our story “Rwanda flights to begin in June, Home Office confirms”, we said that “a couple of weeks in Brussels staying with friends could potentially meet this criteria”. But “criteria” is a plural noun. “Criterion” is technically correct. Thanks to Richard Hanson-James for pointing this out.

Multiple’s annoying cousin: Regular readers will know how much we despise using “multiple” when “several” is much clearer and nicer. But let me introduce a word equally as awful: “numerous”. I’ve spotted it three times across just two of our editions, and I seem to be editing it out of copy more often now. In one story, we said actor Patricia Brake, who recently died, had “appeared in numerous” programmes, and in another, we wrote that we had “spoken to numerous people who attended the Stade de France” on the Champions League final day. I think both phrases would have been less clunky if we used “several” instead.

And here’s this week’s worst offender: “It was the year of numerous lockdowns during a global pandemic”. If “numerous” wasn’t enough, we’ve also pointlessly called it a “global pandemic”. As has been pointed out in this space before, all pandemics are global. Otherwise it would be an epidemic.

Troubled waters: Families across the country feel threatened by the cost of living crisis. But do you know what else feels threatened by it? Swimming pools, apparently. In a piece about how swimming pools could close to save on the costs of heating the water, we wrote that “rising energy costs are not the sole cause of the threat to swimming pools”. But something like “the potential closure of swimming pools is not down to rising energy costs alone” would have been clearer – and far less ominous too. Let’s hope everything goes swimmingly from here.