Mea Culpa: When it comes to extra syllables...

John Rentoul on questions of style and language in last week’s Independent

Fearful symmetry: Orwell was against the ‘padding’ of sentences (Granger/Shutterstock)

When it comes to” is one of those dead phrases that sounds as if it ought to have been on George Orwell’s list, in his essay “Politics and the English Language”, of “verbal false limbs”. I don’t know why he called them that – a poor choice of words to describe the habit of choosing words poorly – but we know what he meant as he gave examples: “render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of” and so on.

As he said, these “save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry”.

Each time we used “when it comes to” over the past week, a simple short word would have been better. In a “news in brief” item on the best “good news” story of the week, namely the $788m (£634m) paid out by Fox News, we said: “The network, in a statement, admitted that a Delaware court found ‘certain claims about Dominion to be false’, but that’s likely as far as the broadcaster will go when it comes to considering its prominent role in broadcasting election conspiracies to viewers.” That could have been “in considering its prominent role”, but there is a problem with “considering” as well. I think we meant something like “in taking responsibility for...”

In a review of a film called How to Blow Up a Pipeline, we said it was “self-critical when it comes to cinema’s role within the [climate] movement”. That could have been “self-critical about cinema’s role”.

The little phrase gets everywhere: it was in an article about football, which asked whether Arsenal “have fatal flaws when it comes to a title race”. That could have been recast to ask whether the club’s title race was fatally flawed. And it was in a politics report, in which we paraphrased Professor Sir John Curtice, the elections analyst, as saying Labour would be looking for a double-digit lead over the Tories “when it comes to vote share” at the local elections next month. That could simply have been “in vote share”.

This is one of those things readers probably don’t notice most of the time, but it has a deadening effect, even if we are not aware of it. As Orwell said, the use of “phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house” gives an impression of imprecision.

Amid progress: I think my campaign is winning. We haven’t used “amid” much over the past week, and not in a single headline. Let us give ourselves a medal. We did, though, report that inflation was higher than economists had predicted “as households across the country continue to grapple with sky-high prices amid the cost of living squeeze”. The thing about sky-high prices is that they are the cost of living squeeze.

And in our report of the protesters at the Grand National last weekend, we said: “A police dispersal zone was put in place around the racecourse amid the threat of disruption.” That was a case where “because of” would have been so much better.

The sedentary position: Later in that Grand National report, we quoted North West Motorway Police, a Twitter account that said: “We have a number of people sat on the M57 at junction 2 northbound – motorway is closed.” No one would have been hurt if we had quietly changed that to the conventional grammar, “sitting”.