Mea Culpa: how ‘mini’ can a car crash be?

John Rentoul, keeper of the Banned List, patrols our use of English last week

Truss and Kwarteng don protective headgear ahead of their collision with reality (PA)

I must apologise to readers for having failed in my duties in policing the English language. Like the Bank of England with interest rates, I have been too slow to act. I have only just got around to putting “won’t touch the sides” on the Banned List. That means that several unacceptable uses got into The Independent before the shutters came down.

Last week, for example, we had an opinion article that said: “Poorer households may benefit from an extra few hundred quid a year thanks to Truss’s tax cuts, but this won’t touch the sides of annual fuel bills.”

I think this phrase became fashionable during coronavirus, when ever-larger sums of taxpayers’ money were deemed inadequate for people’s needs during the crisis. It was a vivid phrase once, an image of a dollop of stuff, possibly food, intended to fill a stomach or a container but disappearing without effect. However, it is overused, and you have had your fun. Let us never hear of the sides again.

Big or small? Another comment article on the chancellor’s statement about his Growth Plan began: “Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-car crash is a failure of historic proportions.” What we meant was that it was a small crash, but the hyphen managed to say that it was an accident involving a small car. A mini-car is possibly a children’s pedal car, but not a Mini, because that would have a capital M. We may have been trying to allude to the statement being called a mini-Budget, I suppose, but in any case the sentence didn’t make sense, because it was either a small crash or it was a big one, one of “historic proportions”. The implication was that it was a big one, so we should have dropped the “mini”.

Limits to pluralism: A couple of times recently we have used “a plurality” when reporting opinion polls, to describe a proportion of the population that is larger than any other group, but not a majority. In a report on attitudes to the monarchy, for example, we said that “a plurality of those aged 18 to 24” supported a republic. By this, we meant that 41 per cent of them did, which was greater than the proportion who wanted to keep the crown, which was 31 per cent.

I think there are ways of conveying this information without using a term that I would expect to see only in specialist writing. In academic papers, you sometimes see our first-past-the-post voting system referred to as “plurality voting” or a “pluralist system”.

We could simply have said, for example, that more young people are opposed to the monarchy than support it, and then given the figures.

Get thee to a writery: In world news in brief we used the word “eatery” in a headline: “Founder of world’s first Michelin-starred ramen eatery dies at 43.” We can understand, even if we cannot condone, a reporter in a hurry reaching for the word in an attempt to avoid repeating the word “restaurant”. But we hadn’t used it once at this stage. We have no excuses.