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.