Mea Culpa: Place your bets on Keir Starmer

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

Some phrases are best avoided across the board (AP)

In an editorial about Sir Keir Starmer, we said: “He must look like a credible prime minister across the piece.” Linda Beeley wrote to ask where this strange expression comes from. I have been unable to enlighten her, so if any reader knows, do get in touch. I think it is business jargon, and according to Google it peaked in popularity in 2007.

As far as I can tell, it is a variation of “across the board”, although that only invites another question. That seems originally to have been a betting phrase, meaning a bet on a horse to win, place or show, and its first known use was in 1945, according to the US Merriam-Webster dictionary. It then came to be used to mean “in all respects”, or “applying to everyone”. Its popularity peaked in 1982, and so perhaps the “piece” version was a desperate attempt to freshen up a tired old phrase.

Even odder is the phrase “across the piste”, which also sometimes pops up – although not in The Independent in the last few months – in which the horse-betting phrase seems to have evolved into something to do with skiing. Best to avoid the lot of them, I think.

Minority report: In an article about an opinion poll of attitudes to police stop-and-search powers, we used the word “plurality”, saying: “a plurality feel no more or less safe in their local area because of them”. This was confusing enough, even without using a word that may not be familiar to many readers. A “plurality” means “more than any other category but not a majority”, and you sometimes see the first-past-the-post voting system described as plurality voting, because the candidate who receives the most votes wins, even if their total falls short of 50 per cent of the votes cast.

But there are usually better ways of describing opinion-poll findings in which there is no majority support for a point of view, such as “more people agree than disagree”. Fortunately, our report went on to explain the findings in perfectly clear language, so the offending sentence could simply be deleted.

Not strictly right: We described John Major as “the apparently straight-laced prime minister” in an article about sex in politics, noting that even he later turned out to have had an affair with Edwina Currie. We meant “strait-laced”, as in tightly done up, rather than “straight” as in conventional.

“Strait”, meaning tight or narrow, from the Latin strictus, drawn tight (hence “strict”), is mostly obsolete except in its meaning of a narrow passage of water, though it is preserved in such linguistic amber as “straitjacket” and “dire straits”. The phrase “strait and narrow”, a biblical tautology, which uses two words with the same meaning for emphasis, has long been more familiar in the form “straight and narrow”. No doubt “strait-laced” will go the same way.

As was wrote: Language is always changing, but it helps to have a feel for usages that have changed only recently, and which some readers will regard, wrongly, as wrong. In an article about pornography in the Commons, we said: “A female minister who said she was sat next to the unnamed colleague …”. The conventional form is “was sitting”, and our journalism will be thought more authoritative if we stick to it, even if it is not how a lot of young people speak. Thanks to Susan Alexander for pointing it out.