Mea culpa: on the trail of some ‘campaigners’

John Rentoul’s regular round-up of errors and omissions

An alleged seller of submarine secrets was ‘ensnarled’ in a sting (US NAVY/AFP via Getty)

We reported the appointment of Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, as a UN envoy advising African countries on economic recovery after the pandemic thus: “Matt Hancock’s new job as UN envoy ‘sickening’, say campaigners.” The last two words tell us nothing, so they should either be deleted or expanded.

“Campaigners” is a weak journalese word: many people who are quoted in news stories are campaigners of some sort. In this case, it referred to an organisation called Global Justice Now. It is hard to describe briefly: it used to be called the World Development Movement, but now calls itself a “social justice organisation” – both a charity and a company – that aims to “mobilise people in the UK for change, and act in solidarity with those fighting injustice, particularly in the global south”. But its name is as good an expression as any of what it is, so we could simply have said “... says Global Justice Now.”

As a footnote, Global Justice Now got its way: it was reported on Saturday that Hancock’s appointment “is not being taken forward”.

Gone to the dogs: We had a story that sounded as if it were straight out of the 1950s, headlined: “US navy engineer accused of selling submarine secrets.” The sub-headline said he was “ensnarled in an FBI sting operation”. This involved hiding an SD card (so it obviously wasn’t the 1950s) in a peanut butter sandwich, but Philip Nalpanis wrote to suggest that we might have meant “ensnared”. He thought “ensnarled” might have been a nice turn of phrase if dogs had been used.

Amounts of grammar: We referred on our sports pages to “the amount of high-quality attacking midfielders and forwards” and in a science report to “an overwhelming amount of electrical impulses from peripheral nerve endings”. In both cases we should have said “number” rather than “amount”, not because it is wrong to use “amount” to refer to countable things, but because a lot of people have been taught that it is. Many of the so-called rules of grammar are mistaken – grammar merely describes how language is used – but one of the tricks of journalism is to avoid distracting the reader with things that they think, wrongly, are wrong.

In an interview with Barbara Hershey, the actor, however, I think we did use “amount” wrongly, by which I mean clumsily, saying: “The Last Temptation of Christ faced ludicrous amounts of backlash upon release.” Can you quantify backlash? I think we meant something like “a ludicrously fierce backlash”.

Eagerly acting in advance: The difference between “anticipate” and “expect” is another pedantry, and it probably matters less than confusing “amount” and “number”. But I still like my anticipations to preserve the original Latin anticipare, to act in advance. So if something is expected, or eagerly awaited, let us say that, and use anticipate when we mean doing something because we think something else is going to happen.

Here is May Bulman doing it right: “In order to free acute hospital beds in anticipation of the first wave of the pandemic, NHS providers were instructed to urgently discharge all medically fit patients as soon as it was clinically safe to do so.” And she split an infinitive in a completely natural way (“to urgently discharge”) just to prove that sometimes it is better to break so-called grammar rules to make yourself clear.