Mea Culpa: Expert clairvoyants and other good guessers

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

Warning: the value of your investment – or indeed that of your prediction – can go up or down ( )

In a report on the pound’s fall on currency markets caused by the increasing chance of the failure of EU trade talks, we said: “Experts warned that the pound could drop to as low as $1.20 if the prospect of a no-deal exit becomes more likely over the coming weeks.” 

The identity of some of these “experts” became clear in the next few paragraphs, in which we quoted a fund manager and a currency analyst, who had some interesting thoughts about the psychology of traders.  

The problem is that no one is really an “expert” at predicting the future. Some people are able to make better-informed guesses than others, but even people who know a lot about foreign exchange markets tend to be little better than a chimpanzee with a dartboard in getting the future right.  

Instead of “experts” we could have said something like “some observers”.  

Access no areas: In a couple of reports of the case of Billy Caldwell, the boy with severe epilepsy whose mother, Charlotte, is campaigning for medical cannabis to be available on the NHS, we said they had been “accessing specialist cannabis oil from a private doctor”. This is a mere stylistic preference, but I think “access” as a verb is a weak and vague word, and we should use “obtain” instead.  

Bang in the middle: We use “amid” an awful lot, and I have commented on it before. It is a word rarely used outside news reporting, where it is usually deployed as a lazy way of joining bits of sentences. We used it 51 times last week, according to a computer search, but I will spare our hard-working reporters’ blushes and draw attention to the one of those 51 times that its use was justified.  

In a selection of Alfred Hitchcock’s top 20 films, Graeme Ross included Foreign Correspondent (1940), which “features several set pieces in the Hitchcock mould including an assassination on rain-lashed steps amid a cavalcade of umbrellas”. Now that is how you use “amid”.  

Gauntlet taken up: In our American football coverage we mentioned some of the new players joining the NFL this year, including Joe Burrow, who was snapped up by the Cincinnati Bengals, who got to choose first. We said he was “tasked with guiding the Bengals through the gauntlet of the AFC North”. Gauntlet, used in this sense, is an excellent word, which we ought to see more often.  

It is usually used in the stock phrase “running the gauntlet”, which used to be a military punishment of running between two rows of men who hit the victim with sticks. It comes from Swedish gatlopp, from gata, lane, and lopp, race. It came into English as gantlope, which was altered by association with gauntlet, meaning glove (thus giving rise to that other familiar phrase, of throwing down the gauntlet as a challenge).  

Credit is due to Jack Rathborn for finding an original way to say that the AFC North, one of the NFL’s eight divisions, is likely to be a particularly hard-fought one.