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.”