Mea Culpa: how to sweeten the bitter pill of Joe Biden’s decline

Misfired metaphors and misspellings in last week’s Independent, ‘improved’ by John Rentoul

President Joe Biden tried to assuage fears about his mental acuity (AP)

I enjoyed the first line of a report on Sunday: “President Joe Biden’s interview with ABC News on Friday evening hasn’t dissuaded fears about his mental acuity just yet.” The word “dissuaded” was like a crossword clue: it had nearly all the right letters in the right order. We meant “assuaged”, which is what you try to do to fears or to feelings of pain, anger and grief, namely soften or alleviate them.

It is from Vulgar Latin adsuaviare, to make sweet or agreeable, via Old French. A lovely word, but not often used in the first paragraphs of news stories. Hence presumably the default to a more common word, which almost works but which has lost its grammatical moorings, because you have to dissuade someone from doing something.

Twilight zone: On Monday we were so upset by the exit of the last British player from Wimbledon that we failed to ensure that our headline made sense: “Emma Raducanu crashes out of Wimbledon after defeat to qualifier Lulu Sun.” She did not crash out “after” her defeat. She crashed out when she lost to Sun. And you don’t suffer a “defeat to” an opponent: “... losing to” would have been better.

But much better was a later headline that said: “Sun sets on Emma Raducanu’s Wimbledon campaign.” Top marks.

Kingdom for a horse: In a comment article at the start of the week, we said: “Farage will have free reign to stroll into parliament…” This is an old favourite of pedantry because the lack of familiarity with horse riding means that several common metaphors have come adrift from their origin. “Free rein” means letting the horse do as it likes, but it has been confused with the idea of a ruler having unchecked power.

From the smithy: On the sports pages on Tuesday we wrote about “two F1 greats going hammer and tong to the chequered flag”. That’s another metaphor from the olden times when people were more familiar with the idea of a blacksmith hammering hot metal and holding it with tongs. Even if the origin of the phrase is forgotten, though, tongs are still used and, as Roger Thetford pointed out, are well known to be plural. One of those odd words, like scissors, tweezers and trousers, which is plural and singular at the same time.

Amidwatch: One of this column’s recurring themes is the overuse of “amid” as a way of joining two parts of a headline or sentence. But on Saturday we used “amid” at the start of a headline: “Amid the anti-tourism trend, here are six destinations that desperately want you to pay them a visit.” That is simply using “amid” as a blank word, allowing readers to infer the meaning for themselves – something along the lines of: “You know there are these campaigns against tourism in various overvisited places? Well here’s the other side of the story.”

If the headline had been written in English instead of in journalese, it could have said: “Against the anti-tourism trend”, followed by a colon.

Lake Lakes: One of the things that a lot of people know about the Lake District is that there is only one lake in it that has “Lake” in its name, which is Bassenthwaite Lake. The others are all Waters or Meres. So it was unfortunate that an article promising “Seven of the best walks in the Lake District” had one reference to “Lake Windermere” and a picture caption referring to “Lake Buttermere”.

Thanks to Philip Talbot for pointing this out, and for prompting us to improve the spelling of “Wastewater”, a lake that is usually spelled “Wastwater” or “Wast Water”. Apparently, “Wast” is from Old Norse, vatn, meaning water or lake, so if we had called it Lake Wastwater it would mean Lake Lake Lake. Thank goodness we didn’t make that mistake.