Mea Culpa: Wildfires spreading and shrinking at the same time

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

The football field has long been a standard unit of measurement in journalism (Getty)

In an article with a headline that claimed “wildfires engulf Europe”, we managed to minimise the area affected. We said 40,000 hectares was “at least 75 football fields”. This is not untrue in itself, but as Philip Nalpanis pointed out, the grassed area of a UK football pitch is about a hectare (the pitch itself is 0.6 to 0.8 hectares), so it was quite an understatement.

Even if we had got it right, though, the headline was overdoing it – most of Europe was not engulfed by wildfires.

We overdid some of our reporting of the part of Europe that is closer to home as well. Linda Beeley drew my attention to this sentence: “The heatwave caused chaos to transport services as multiple wildfires raged across the country.” There seems to be an unwritten rule of journalism that any disruption to travel must be described as “chaos”, but here we added unnecessary words just to make sure.

I have railed against “multiple”, instead of the normal English “several”, before, but here we didn’t need either: the plural “wildfires” tells us that there were more than one of them. Nor did we need “services”. We could have cut it down to something like “The heatwave disrupted travel as wildfires raged across the country”, which would have been punchier.

Translation lakhing: In “World news in brief”, an item about Indian universities referred to “18 lakh students”. Thanks again to Philip Nalpanis for spotting this. Having been brought up in India, I love the Indian names for large numbers: lakh for 100,000 and crore for 10 million (or 100 lakhs).

I assume this was taken from an Indian news agency report, but it ought to have been converted into the number format more familiar to our British and US readers, so it should have said 1.8 million students.

Stranger from Samaria: Thank you to Holly Baxter for doing some of my work for me in taking issue with the US police, who repeatedly described Elisjsha Dicken as a “good samaritan”. He was the citizen with a legal handgun who shot and killed the mass shooter who opened fire in an Indiana shopping mall. As Holly said, “the tale of the good Samaritan is supposed to emphasise tolerance and compassion, rather than righteous violence.” It doesn’t mean just a passer-by who does a good deed.

Not going on: We referred this week to “the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine”, the loss of bookings that “will fuel ongoing fears about the plight of musicians”, and the intervention by the UNHCR “in the ongoing legal challenge” to the government’s Rwanda asylum policy. In each case, the word “ongoing” could simply be deleted. The assumption in any journalism is that we are talking about the current war, the current fears, or the current court case.

If we really need a word to refer to something that will continue, I prefer “continuing”.

Up in the air: We had a couple of skyrocketings last week. Temperatures were “set to skyrocket to 40C”, we reported, while rents were said to be “skyrocketing by more than 20 per cent in some areas”. I have said it before, but rockets usually go in the sky, so the longer word adds nothing to straightforward “rocketing”.