Mea Culpa: a ship on rails? Boris Johnson’s transport revolution

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

The prime minister launches a thousand train-based metaphors (Getty)

The government’s integrated rail plan was announced last week, which meant a big week for railway metaphors. The worst offender was an editorial headlined: “Johnson’s flagship project has hit the buffers.” Hitting the buffers was bad enough, but a flagship would hit those tyres they hang over the edges of docks to stop the boats scraping their hulls. Not just a clanging cliche but a mixed metaphor as well.

Badly trained dumpling: We had a fine misspelling in a report on British women in Syrian detention camps who are at risk of losing their citizenship and who may be separated from their children: “To separate them would be to inflict wonton trauma on children who have been through vast amounts of harm.”

We were quoting Maya Foa of Reprieve, the human rights organisation, but the trouble with “wanton” is that it is an unusual word, and so we confused it with a Chinese dumpling. It is a good word, from the Middle English wantowen, “rebellious, lacking discipline”, from wan-, “badly”, and the Old English togen, “trained” (related to team and tow). We should use it more often, and then we would be less likely to spell it wrongly.

Multiplied reduction: In a report of the Czech Republic announcing a lockdown for the unvaccinated, we said that “the Czech population is six times smaller” than the UK’s. Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for drawing attention to a breach of my rule that we should keep words for multiplication and division separate. I think we should say “the Czech population is one-sixth of the UK’s”.

Weather report: It is cold in Poland at this time of year, which can mean only one thing: an outbreak of conditions. We referred to “freezing conditions” on the Belarus border in one article, but praise is due to Amanda Coakley, who wrote about “the region’s freezing temperatures”.

Meanwhile in India, the air quality in and around New Delhi prompted a different outbreak. A caption said that a photograph showed people visiting the Mehtab Bagh complex behind the Taj Mahal “amid smoggy conditions in Agra”. In normal English that would be “in smog in Agra”.

More weather: We described the flooding around Vancouver as “the second large-scale catastrophic event in less than six months”, after wildfires swept parts of British Columbia in the summer. A catastrophe usually means a disaster on a large scale, so we didn’t need the adjective. “Large-scale” is in any case just a clumsy way of avoiding saying “big” so we wouldn’t have needed it anyway.

Delete, delete: Sorry to be on-going about it, but we do not need “ongoing”. Last week, we had the “ongoing HGV driver crisis”, “ongoing disputes between Brussels and Warsaw” and even “ongoing racial inequality”. Every time, our writing would have been better and crisper without it.