Mea Culpa: Donald Trump, wreaker of havoc

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

Former US president Donald Trump arrives at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Georgia (Getty)

In a comment article on Donald Trump’s court appearance on Friday, we said that the former president would not be entering into any plea bargaining negotiations with the justice department. He thought, we speculated, that “any deal would wreak of weakness”. Thanks to John Schluter for pointing out that we meant “reek”, as in “smell strongly”.

Our author might have been subliminally influenced by the “w” and “ea” of “weakness”, or by the all-too-common mental image of Trump “wreaking havoc”. “Wreak” is a good old-fashioned Old English word that used to mean “avenge”, but now mainly means “inflict damage”. It is a rather Trumpian word, but it is not the right one here.

Opposites: I once compiled a Top 10 words with opposite meanings. One of them was “sanction”, which can mean “approve” or “punish”. This confused Teri Walsh on Friday, when we reported that Luis Rubiales, the head of the Spanish football association, was in trouble after “three formal complaints over whether his behaviour constituted an infraction of Spain’s sports law, which sanctions sexist acts”.

The trouble is that the verb form of sanction usually has the first, positive meaning; the negative one usually comes as a noun, as in “imposing sanctions on Russia”. We changed it to say “... which penalises sexism”.

Who died when: On Monday, we marked the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death with an article that referred to Marie-Therese Walter, Picasso’s lover and the mother of his daughter. We said: “Walter took her own life, aged 68, following Picasso’s death in 1977.” Thanks to Nigel Fox for pointing out that we had too many facts in a confusing order and a missing comma (after “death”). The point of the article was that Picasso died in 1973 – 50 years ago. We recast the sentence thus: “Walter took her own life in 1977, aged 68, four years after Picasso’s death.”

Falling star: We had a pedant’s old favourite in a headline about the remarkable promotion of the new energy secretary: “The meteoric rise of Claire Coutinho – but will she crash and burn?” A meteor, or shooting star, is the streak of light from a heated and glowing object falling through the Earth’s atmosphere, so a meteor is already burning and crashing.

Melting pot: It may be almost time to give up the attempt to beat back the use of “likely” to mean “probably”, an Americanism used four times in our report of the Australian woman with a worm in her brain. We said she “likely caught the roundworm after collecting a type of native grass, called Warrigal greens, beside a lake near where she lived”.

Thanks to Paul Edwards for suggesting that, even if the advance of “likely” cannot be halted, we didn’t need it in this sentence: “This is where a python may have likely shed the parasite through its faeces.” The word “may” does all the work we need; we didn’t need an extra “likely” – or even a “probably” – there.

When US and British English finally merge into a single mid-Atlantic dialect, probably called Amenglish, The Independent may be one of the melting pots in which it happens. We have a huge audience in North America and ambitious plans to expand our US staff, while the internet is accelerating the convergence, especially among the young.

Until we reach the singularity, however, we should try to maintain our British English style, for the sake of consistency and a distinctive voice.