Mea Culpa: Sinfield is more than just a marathon man

Jo Turner is minding our language in this week’s Independent

Rugby League legend Kevin Sinfield is raising funds for motor neurone disease (PA Wire)

A headline in our sport pages this week highlighted how carefully we must choose our words – and how easy it can be to fall into the trap of a cliche.

Friend of this column Philip Nalpanis brought to our attention the article “Sinfield completes 24-hour marathon challenge” in the Daily Edition. He rightly pointed out that the use of “marathon” in its metaphorical sense – a long-lasting difficult task or activity – plays down the monumental achievement of former Leeds Rhinos captain Kevin Sinfield, who ran 101 miles in 24 hours to raise money for motor neurone disease research – the best part of four marathons. Apologies and congratulations to Mr Sinfield.

Word pollution: A story about the UK’s continuing subsidies to fossil-fuel companies contained this sentence, which is a bit of a doozy: “Three campaigners from environmental group Paid to Pollute argue this is neither economic for the UK as a whole and also conflicts with the country’s legal duty to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.”

First there’s the “neither”, which should be paired with “nor”. Then there’s the incorrect use of “economic” – that should be “economical”. “As a whole” is unnecessary, and by the time “and also” comes out of nowhere, all hope of comprehension is lost. A simpler way to put it would have been: “Three campaigners from environmental group Paid to Pollute argue this is neither economical for the UK nor in line with the country’s legal duty to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.”

Off the boil: In an article about the dire state of affairs between the UK and France with regard to Channel crossings, we talked about how immigration is a “hot political potato”. “I know what a hot potato is but not sure about political ones,” said one vigilant reader. We could have said “political hot potato”, but perhaps the best way to put it would simply have been “hot potato”.

Damp squib: One reader questioned our use of the phrase “damp down”, as in “to damp down speculation” about possible challenges to the prime minister’s leadership – would “dampen down” be more appropriate here? Nice try, but damp down is perfectly acceptable, and dampen down even adds an extra syllable, something we try to avoid in our edits.

As it happens, the use of damp as a verb has been around since the 1300s, when it was used figuratively to describe choking or stifling something. Over time, dampen took on the literal meaning, “to make wet”, while damp continued to be used figuratively. Of course, dampen is now an acceptable metaphor too; personally I’d prefer it here, but you don’t need the down – dampen speculation is fine.