Mea Culpa: Serial killers

Susanna Richards catalogues the errors in last week’s Independent

A harmless creature like the comma should be handled with care, respect, and a little trepidation (Getty/iStock)

The serial comma – also known as the Oxford or Harvard comma – is pretty unpopular among the literary classes. Not for its own modest properties – it is unarguable that it serves a function, as a mark that is inserted before the final item in a list – but because allusion to it by anyone in the public eye is bound to elicit an eruption of antipathy, often from those who do not properly understand the purpose of this small yet oddly obtrusive device. This is followed invariably by the patient explanation of why it matters, by those who do.

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? There is plenty of comma-based discourse already within the editorial department, and that’s without invoking this particular djinn. So we don’t talk about it unless we have to. Last week we were asked to issue a statement, which I’m proud to say was sensibly brief and phlegmatic: our considered view is that commas are both overused and misused. And that unless clarity itself is at stake, the use of a serial comma is not necessary – though sometimes clarity is at stake, and so, to my mind, it does no good to cast the poor little creature as a cuckoo in the nest. After all, it is only an ordinary comma on secondment (I pay mine extra for special ops).

Bear with: We managed to attribute responsibility to entirely the wrong party last week in a wonderful article charting some of the strange behaviour surrounding the Queen’s funeral. “There were also outcries against guards’ hats made from the fur of black bears by animal rights groups,” we wrote, apparently oblivious to the double meaning. Obviously the animal rights groups do not make the hats, and a little syntactic rearrangement ensured that this was clear. Thanks go to Paul Edwards for letting us know about it.

Writing on the wall: In an article on a proposed change to the rules about counsellors of state, we said: “The move would see Andrew, Harry and Beatrice become illegible for the role.” It’s a glorious error – actually an original malapropism, occurring in Richard Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals – and part of me wishes we made that sort of mistake more often. What we meant to say, of course, was “ineligible” – eligible being from the Latin eligere, to choose, while legible is from legere, to read. (I bet the Romans mixed them up, too.)

More is less: “For the past 40 years, we have lived under an economic system that has given increasingly more power to the wealthy at the expense of working people,” we wrote in a comment piece about abolishing the monarchy. In a time of fiscal constraint, it is only right that we take a frugal approach to our language, too, and “increasingly more” is the kind of tautology we can do without. Back in the cupboard went the extra syllables.

Core blimey: In a photograph caption last week, we referred to a “core reactor”. There is no such thing – unless, as reader Philip Nalpanis suggested, the word “core” alluded to the central role of said reactor (it was, to be fair, about Ukraine’s second-largest nuclear power plant). We went on to say, in the same article, that Russia had “amped up the military warfare in Ukraine” – an interesting variation on the ubiquitous “ramped up”, combined with (increasingly) more tautology. I suppose there are non-military kinds of warfare; cyber, perhaps. But I don’t think it was necessary to clarify which we meant in this case. In fact, we might better have said “stepped up its military activity”.

Our correspondent also took issue with a headline that referred to a former Test cricket captain calling for “less county matches”. Some don’t think the distinction between less and fewer is an important one, but in an instance like this, using “less” means that the word “county” could at first sight be mistaken for a description; perhaps the person in question thinks the matches are too aristocratic (or involve too much counting)? The mind boggles. Too late to change it, I’m afraid, but we’ll try to do better next time.

Typo of the week: Leaving aside a report in which we managed to spell the name Medvedchuk in no fewer than four different ways, we had a near miss in an article about the continuing trials of life after the death of a monarch, when we wrote about a week during which “the nation has understandably been focused on the upcoming funeral and internment of our dear beloved Queen Elizabeth”. As regular readers will have spotted, that should have been “interment”: it would be awfully bad luck to be buried and imprisoned without charge in the same week. Thankfully it was fixed before publication, so no one will ever know. Until next time, long live the King – and the spellchecker.