Mea Culpa: tricky double meanings

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

Prince Harry arriving at the High Court last week (Reuters)

No matter how often it goes wrong, people persist in using this form of double negative. We quoted the chief executive of a homelessness charity thus: “It cannot be understated how traumatic, dangerous and dehumanising life on the streets is.” Thanks to Linda Beeley for pointing it out. I know we were quoting someone else’s words, but it is only polite for us to correct them discreetly. That has been changed to “overstated”.

Hard corps: Another hazard of quoting people is that some words sound the same but are written differently. Thus we quoted a military analyst as saying “the Russian officer’s core has been successfully eviscerated by the Ukrainians”. I think what our expert thought he was saying was “officers’ corps”.

Magic trick: Still with words that sound the same, we commented that it was mysterious that David Sherborne, one of the barristers in the High Court hearing involving Prince Harry, is not a King’s Counsel – but that he had made enough money in the Vardy and Rooney case “to comfort him against the sleight”. Thanks to Paul Edwards for pointing out that we meant “slight”.

“Sleight”, from the same Old Norse root as “sly”, means cunning or a trick, and only really survives in the phrase “sleight of hand”. “Slight” meaning insult comes from the adjective meaning “of little weight or worth”, which came to mean “treat with indifference” in the 16th century.

Half a loop: In a report of a plan by Transport for London for “Superloop” bus routes to connect outer London, we said: “TfL is consulting with local authorities on a new link between Harrow and North Finchley, which would effectively comprise a western hemisphere around the capital.” Personally I don’t think we need “with” after “consulting” any more than we need it after “meet”, but that is a losing battle. More importantly, as Philip Nalpanis pointed out, “comprise” should be “complete” (something comprises the parts that make it up), and “hemisphere” should be “semicircle”. London is more like a flat circle than a globe.

Many, more, multiple: They are known in the trade as backgrounders: articles after dramatic events setting out the history of similar events and the controversies about them. We published one after the Nashville school shooting, the first sentence of which read: “It’s a headline that’s all too common in America, a country with more than one mass shooting per day: a mass shooter has killed multiple people using an assault-style rifle.”

Thanks to Iain Boyd for drawing it to my attention. The duplication of “mass shooting” and “mass shooter” was ungainly, and my views on “multiple” are well known: “several” is always preferable. Also, I don’t know much about guns, but I doubt if the difference between an assault rifle and an assault-style rifle matters – it is a gun that can fire continuously. The part of that sentence after the colon could have read: “A shooter has killed several people using an assault rifle.”

View again: In the past week we referred to three reviews “into” things. You can have an inquiry into something, but you have a review “of” an issue. We should have referred to Chris Skidmore’s review “of” how the UK can reach net zero by 2050; a safety review “of” University Hospitals Birmingham Foundation Trust; and Baroness Casey’s review “of” the Metropolitan Police. Or we could have called them inquiries.