Mea Culpa: on your bike to sell some dodgy cures

John Rentoul’s regular roundup of errors and omissions

This cyclist is not trying to sell you something

We had a subheadline on a comment article that started: “Coronavirus sceptics pedal misleading narratives…” This is one of those misspellings that seems to make sense, in that the coronavirus sceptics might be propelling the misleading narratives as if they were riding a bicycle, or a hobby horse. But the original meaning was “peddle”, as in sell, in the derogatory sense of making misleading claims about a product. 

That’s the trouble with antique words preserved in the aspic of metaphor: people who are unfamiliar with the original word substitute a more familiar one. In this case, possibly influenced by a sentence in the article about “the foot taken off the pedal in terms of academic attainment” – which is a different metaphor altogether. 

Then there is “narratives”. That should have set off the academic jargon klaxon. “Claims” would have done perfectly well. 

Force of age: In an article about protests in Moscow against the detention of Alexei Navalny we reported: “Nadezhda Ivanovna, surname withheld, a retired economics teacher, was one of few who managed to evade the first few checkpoints – she got by the checks by dent of her advanced age.” As Roger Thetford wrote to point out, “dint” is a variant spelling of “dent”, but the usual phrase is “by dint of”. It seems to have evolved from a phrase meaning to take something by force, a dint or dent being a blow with a weapon – which later came to mean a hollow made by such a blow. 

Disappointness: On our sports pages we wrote of “Liverpool’s passiveness without the ball”, to the disappointment of Richard Hanson-James, who praised the general quality of our writing. “In contrast, presumably, to their customary activeness,” he wrote. That is us told: passivity and activity are the usual noun forms. 

Iron horse track: A couple of readers noticed that we called a railway a railroad in a caption to one of our Pictures of the Day. Railroad is a rather romantic Americanism, and the comments might have been dismissed had the photo been of an American railway, but it wasn’t, it was in Germany. 

What for: Talking of Americanisms, we had a few uses of “advocate for” last week. We said, for example: “Autocrats and strongmen from the US to Brazil to India and Belarus have downplayed the virus, warned against preventative measures, and even advocated for dangerous medical remedies.” The British style used to be to do without the “for”, but this is one of those language changes that is happening whether we like it or not, because young Britons are taking it up. As long as a significant number of our British readers think it is wrong, though, we should avoid it.  

Gone not forgotten: There is one Americanism that even Americans seem to get wrong. “Impeach” means “charge”. Donald Trump has been charged with “high crimes and misdemeanours”, and will be tried by the Senate. This is not an “impeachment trial”, and Trump’s lawyers’ arguments are not an “impeachment defence”, as we called them last week. Impeachment is often loosely used to describe the whole process of removing a president from office – or in Trump’s case preventing him from holding office in future – but the end point is conviction or acquittal, not impeachment.