Mea Culpa: Starting a fire in a river

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

We should be cautious not to overuse metaphors in our reporting (Getty/iStock)

One of the best titles of an autobiography is Sparks Fly!, by Frank Chapple, the general secretary of the electricians’ union who enjoyed provoking communists and people he regarded as their fellow travellers in the labour movement. “Sparks” is a lively word, often used by journalists when they write about an event causing an argument or another reaction. It is useful, especially for headlines, because it is short.

However, we should use it sparingly, and remember that the analogy is with sparks starting a fire. It didn’t feel right that, in a “news in brief” report, we spoke of Nicola Bulley’s disappearance “sparking a huge search operation”, much of which took place in a river. Other words, such as “prompting” or “starting”, are available, even if they might not be so dramatic.

Partial history: The first item in our “On this day” feature on Wednesday read thus: “1606: The Union Flag became England’s official flag.” This is true, but it omits material facts, as Iain Brodie pointed out. One is that it also became the flag of Scotland; another is that it was not the same flag as the union flag of today, which dates from 1801, because it didn’t include the red diagonals from St Patrick’s cross for Ireland.

Befriending: Allow me to come to the defence of Mary Dejevsky, whose comment article on Joe Biden’s visit to Belfast said that “Northern Ireland still suffers from many of the tensions that bedog divided communities elsewhere”. A reader wrote to ask if she meant “bedevil” or “dog”, either of which would have been more familiar. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with “bedog”, in my view. It is a perfectly respectable, if unexpected, use of the “be-” prefix, and ought to be used more often.

Numbers, again: I shall stop going on about spurious precision in a moment, but we have had two clanging examples in the past few days. We referred to something being “about 93 miles north of Cairo”. Presumably the “about” was left over from an original reference to “about 150km”. Indeed, 150km is 93 miles, to the nearest whole mile, but the “about” should be a clue that the 150km was not a precise figure to start with, so it makes no sense to give the miles in whatever is the opposite of a round number. “About 90 miles” is what we wanted here.

We did something similar in a report of the shocking number of patients waiting longer than 12 hours in A&E. We said “10.6 per cent of arrivals at hospitals with major A&E departments in February had to wait more than 12 hours before being admitted, discharged or transferred – the equivalent of 125,505 people.” This is an excessively specific number, because the 10.6 per cent contains three significant digits, so the result of a calculation using it should have no more than three significant digits. We could have said 126,000, or “about 125,000”. Also, it is not “the equivalent” of that many people, it is that many people, to the nearest thousand.

New verb alert: We had an ungainly subheadline on our report of Keir Starmer putting his £2,000-a-week chauffeur-driven car on expenses when he was head of the Crown Prosecution Service: “Future Labour leader expensed three times what his successor in the same job would.” To expense, meaning to claim on expenses, is a fairly new verb, and sounds casual to my ears – not the right tone for a news report.

The rest of the sentence then gets into a tangle: his successor means the person who does “the same job” next, and the “would”, which is intended to place her claims in the future at the time when Starmer made his, is not needed because “successor” makes that clear. Besides, it is an awkward way to end a sentence. We could have said something like: “Future Labour leader claimed three times as much as his successor.”