Mea Culpa: how can we be sure that Donald Trump won’t come back?

Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent

Surely not? (Getty Images)

In an editorial on the congressional committee looking into the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, we wrote: “The continual reminders of the lunacies of the final days of his presidency will not reflect well on Mr Trump, and will surely harm his chances of a comeback in 2024.”

That word “surely” is one of my red flags. I think it usually marks the point at which a writer makes a jump in an argument that is unsupported by the evidence, and often marks a switch from what is to what ought to be. The Independent does not believe the hearings will reflect well on the former president, but the “surely” indicates more of a hope than an expectation. Personally, I hope we are right, but I fear that we are not.

Nothing so ex as an ex-minister: We referred to Philip Hammond as an “ex-Tory chancellor” and then an “ex-cabinet minister” last week, as Philip Nalpanis pointed out. I think most readers would have known what we meant, but the “ex-hyphen” formula, although it is often used because it is short, is best avoided.

Pedantically, we were calling him a chancellor who used to be a Conservative, and a minister who used to be in the cabinet. Such fleeting ambiguity would be avoided, and it would read better, if we described him as a “Tory former chancellor” and a “former cabinet minister”.

Cattle are lowing: In an opinion article about how ministers respond to statistics on crime, we said: “New figures will be released, for example, about charges for rape and, low and behold, they will draft some words about what they will do.” Thanks to John Schluter for pointing out this unconventional spelling of an archaic phrase. “Lo” is an exclamation, common at the time the Bible was first translated into English, meaning “Look!” And “lo and behold” is an example of tautological emphasis, using two words meaning the same thing to drive home the point.

Under-exposure: Another of our commentators expressed the view that “the voting public can warm to Starmer as they become more regularly exposed to him in the run-up to an election”. I think we meant “frequently”, rather than suggesting that the Labour leader should appear before the public on a fixed rota. He already has “regular” appearances, at Prime Minister’s Questions every Wednesday and a radio phone-in on Mondays: it is not the regularity that matters, but how often he says something interesting enough to get on the news bulletins and to break through to the wider public.

Americanisms watch: We mentioned an “upscale” restaurant in New York the other day, which I think is an acceptable US English alternative to “upmarket”. But when we tried to say how big Barbados is, we described it as “a Caribbean island nation about three-quarters the size of Chicago”. Owen Jones wrote to say he has no idea how big Chicago is. It is a fair point, but our US journalists and our vast US readership would equally have little idea how big the Isle of Wight is, which might be the natural comparison for a British audience. Perhaps we didn’t really need a comparison for the area of the island at all, and could just have said that the population of Barbados is 300,000, which gives a simple idea of the size of the country.