Mea Culpa: Quite frankly, the less said about this the better

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

You’d be less likely to catch or pass on the virus if there were fewer people on your commute (EPA)

What we journalists would call a storm of protest greeted a headline in the Daily Edition last week. It said: “Less people commuting to offices will be a good thing.” The convention is that this should be “fewer people”. There is no good reason for that, and the meaning of our headline was clear, but many people are used to the convention and regard any departure from it as mistaken.

As ever, it is in our own interest to know these conventions and abide by them. Less of quantity, fewer of number. Using “less” of a countable noun such as “people” distracts some readers and undermines their confidence in us. And it means I get emails from some of them – which is absolutely fine and most welcome.

Hard to understand: We got ourselves in a twist in an editorial about the government’s communications on coronavirus. We said: “Even the most generous judges would find it hard to conclude that the new messaging is poor.” We meant the opposite, which was unfortunate in an article about other people’s mixed messages. Thanks to Bernard Theobald for pointing it out. It was easily fixed by deleting “find it hard to”.

Age-old: We reported, because some people are interested in him, Piers Morgan’s complaint that Matt Hancock, the health secretary, failed to appear on his TV show last week. Pausing for a moment in the middle of quoting the blowhard, we said: “The 55-year-old presenter continued: ‘It is a disgrace. They don’t want to be challenged, they don’t want to answer the difficult questions.’”

Paul Edwards wrote to say that he “searched the story in vain for that other piece of vital information, Hancock’s age”. I know we didn’t need to know, but now that he mentioned it, I had to look it up. Mr Hancock is 41.

Eight-year Obama: Our fondness for irrelevant information also gave us the description of Barack Obama as “the two-term president” in a report of Donald Trump’s attempt to blame his predecessor for America’s lack of pandemic preparation. That Obama served two terms had no bearing on the story, unless it was a subliminal attempt to suggest that the current president may not win re-election in November, and thus lose to his great rival on history’s scoreboard.

Check: We reported two stalemates on our foreign pages last week, in Israel and Iraq. A stalemate is a perfectly serviceable metaphor from chess, but we said Benjamin Netanyahu was hoping to “break the political stalemate” in Israel, while we said the appointment of Mustafa al-Kadhimi as the new prime minister in Iraq “ends months of political stalemate” there.

The thing about stalemate is that it is the end of the game: it cannot be broken or escaped. New metaphors please.