Mea Culpa: ‘Mr Trader who is opposed to slaves, I presume?’

John Rentoul minds our language in last week’s Independent

Nothing personal: an artist’s impression of Henry Stanley meeting David Livingstone near Lake Tanganyika (Getty)

In an article marking the 150th anniversary of the day Henry Stanley claimed to have greeted a stranger in what is now Tanzania with the words, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”, we described David Livingstone as a “missionary, explorer and anti-slave trader”.

As Philip Nalpanis said when he wrote to me about it, we know what “anti-slave trader” means, but the hyphenation is a bit strange. Read literally, it would suggest that Livingstone was a trader who wanted to eliminate slaves, on the pattern of “anti-aircraft gun”. He wasn’t a trader, but he did want to get rid of slaves, by getting rid of slavery; we meant that he was an opponent of the slave trade. Perhaps we should have just said that: “Missionary, explorer and campaigner against the slave trade.”

Slowing down in chains: Some terrible uses of “amid” last week, although only once in a headline: “Economic growth slows amid supply chain crisis” – that should have been “because of”. And “supply chain crisis” is a bit of journalistic verbiage as well; I think “labour shortages” is more precise.

After-words: A word that journalists sometimes use instead of “amid” is “after”. I assume it is a habit formed as a result of taking sensible care over attributing cause and effect. If we say A happened after B, we are not necessarily saying A caused B. But the number of cases where we have to be so cautious is small, and sometimes the use of “after” means we end up saying something we didn’t intend. Last week, for example, we had a headline: “Geoffrey Cox: Tory MP ‘does not believe’ he broke rules after using Commons office for second job in Caribbean.” This implied that he might believe he broke the rules before using his Commons office for a legal hearing. We changed “after” to “by”.

All inclusive: In another part of the political forest, we reported the results of our investigation which found that “five current ministers” had “claimed for rent while letting out homes” in London, “including…” We then listed all five of them. It may be that we thought that there could be others, but as we were reporting the five that our investigation had found, we should have deleted “including” and just used a colon instead.

Low horse power: An old favourite, spotted by several readers before it was changed: we said that Keir Starmer criticised Boris Johnson for his “threats to reign in the powers of the Electoral Commission”. We meant “rein in”, as in holding a horse back.

Hole in the wall: Some headlines are designed to intrigue the reader, and to create a mystery that might be solved by reading on. “Pandemic offers window on changing climate behaviour” was certainly puzzling, although I am not sure it was done on purpose. The phrase “offer a window on” something is a rather upmarket way of saying that something provides an insight into something else, but it has been overdone. “Offers a rare window” used to be a surprisingly common phrase in The Washington Post, according to Carlos Lozada, one of its editors.

In this case, the headline was on an interesting article about whether the big changes in behaviour during coronavirus lockdowns contained any lessons for how to make the changes on an even greater scale, and permanently, that may be needed to avoid disastrous climate change. Tough to put that in a short headline, I know, but the mental image of a virus offering us a window frame through which we could observe the changeable climate was perhaps not best designed to draw the reader in.