Mea Culpa: hands up who really knows what an arthropod is

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

Arthropod, arachnid? Or can we get away with ‘insect’? (Kenneth Chin)

In a story about Jamie Thorpe, who takes amazing photographs of small creatures, we described spiders as insects. Mick O’Hare, who writes for New Scientist (as well as for The Independent), pointed out that they are not. I don’t feel strongly about it, and neither does Mr Thorpe: we quoted him calling them insects too. It gets complicated if you have to refer to arachnids, insects and other arthropods, and patronising if you go the other way and call them bugs and creepy-crawlies, so I think occasionally using “insects” to refer to them all is fine.

Might is right: In the report of the Foreign Office being criticised for its handling of the evacuation of Kabul, we said: “Ministers were accused of having a ‘total absence of a plan’ for Afghans who supported the British mission, despite knowing for 18 months that the evacuations may be necessary if the US withdrew its troops.” That should be “might”, as Paul Edwards pointed out, because it is all over now.

Whale-pigeon: Paul also mentioned the charming story of a humpback whale that gave a “thank you” sign to its human rescuers. Only the story did not say what the sign was. “Was it a stream of bubbles forming the word ‘Gracias’?” he asked. Or a slap of the tailfin, perhaps? Also, the past tense of “dive” in British English is “dived”, not “dove”. In British English that’s a kind of pigeon.

Hyphen on the loose: We said that “demand for occupational therapy-led rehabilitation services in Britain has increased” in the past six months in a news story. Thanks to John Harrison for pointing out a rogue hyphen that has escaped our recent cull. This is definitely a case where no hyphen is better than one that seems to split a compound such as “occupational therapy”. Mind you, I would have been inclined to delete the whole mess and refer to the “demand for rehabilitation services”.

No escape: We reported that Rebekah Vardy reacted to Coleen Rooney’s revelation of the chief suspect in the “Wagatha” drama by saying: “I can’t let her getaway with this.” A noun or an adjective is one word – they made their getaway in the getaway car – but a verb is two: “get away”.

Strive to keep alive: In a news story about a new treatment for women with advanced breast cancer, we said: “The drug, for women with incurable secondary triple-negative breast cancer, strives to slow down disease progression, which in turn helps patients live longer.” “Can a drug strive?” asked Linda Beeley. That is a Question To Which The Answer Is No. We needed something like “can” instead of “strives to”. And we didn’t really need that final clause, as slowing down the advance of an incurable disease by definition means the patient lives longer.

Memo to self: In our report of the brave attempt by Penny Mordaunt, the trade minister, to gloss over the UK’s failure to sign a trade deal with the US by signing non-binding deals with individual US states, we said her department expects around eight “memorandum of understandings” to be agreed soon. Thanks to John Harrison for pointing out that the plural of an agreement commonly abbreviated as an MOU is memorandums of understanding.

Grounded: Finally, I return to my campaign against “amid”, amid a sea of journalese. As Iain Boyd wrote to say, our headline, “Hundreds of easyJet flights grounded amid tech failure,” was incorrect. As the report made clear, the computer problems were the cause of the cancellations. “By tech failure” would not only have been more accurate, it would have been shorter.