Mea Culpa: pooches and pet peeves

Olivia Fletcher minds our language in last week’s Independent

Ch-ch-changes: we fixed a rather insensitive headline last week comparing Shane Warne’s passing with David Bowie’s (Reuters)

Sometimes admitting we’ve made a dog’s dinner of something is the tough but right thing to do. Case in point: an article we wrote about Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Hungary. In it, we said: “One woman, holding a designer handbag, showed off her full-bred bichon frise poodle.”

A “bichon frise poodle” isn’t actually a full-bred dog, which is one whose parents are from the same breed. This makes the phrase “full-bred bichon frise poodle” an oxymoron. The dog is in fact a cross-breed. We’d have been better off omitting the word; it would have avoided the error and made the phrase more concise too.

We also could have been less ambiguous when we mentioned the designer handbag. I think it sounds like the pet could be inside the woman’s purse, like something socialite Paris Hilton would have done with her pooch in the Noughties. But it could also mean the woman was holding a designer handbag while showing off the dog.

Age isn’t just a number: Simon Gamble wrote to us about an interview we did with Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos last week. We asked the Scottish musician nearing his 50th birthday how he’ll stay stylish in his fifth decade. But Simon pointed out that he’s about to leave that decade behind and enter his sixth. As the lyrics to the Franz Ferdinand song “Take Me Out” go: “I say, don’t you know?” Well, I suppose sometimes we don’t.

Armed struggle: Last week, we were guilty of tautology in one of our headlines. We titled an article: “Distressing footage captures moment British journalists shot during armed ambush in Ukraine.”

I think it’s reasonable to assume the ambush was armed if journalists were being shot, which means we could have omitted “armed” for brevity’s sake. And while we’re here, I reckon we could have got away with omitting “distressing” from the headline too. Is there a situation we could imagine in which journalists being shot at in an ambush wasn’t distressing? Probably not.

Lessons in sensitivity: Another headline qualm. Last week we published a letter from one of our editors about the death of cricketer Shane Warne with this headline: “Ashes to Ashes: Warne dying shocked the same as Bowie”. It’s a rather crass way to honour the spin bowler who took 708 wickets for Australia (and disrespectful to David Bowie, for that matter). We shouldn’t have used the term “ashes” given how morbid it sounds.

Fortunately, we changed the headline on our website. We went with: “The news of Shane Warne’s death was to cricket what David Bowie’s was to music.” Thanks to Richard Thomas who pointed this out.

Reaching the limit: We could have made ourselves clearer in another editorial when we wrote: “The government’s response is embarrassing and shameful, and all the more so because it is so at odds with the sunny rhetoric of ministers promising uncapped and limitless schemes – whereas the reality is that the rules severely delimit their access.”

John Harrison wrote to say that “limit” would have been the correct term to use. Delimit means to define the boundaries of something; we meant to limit, as in restrict. I find it’s better to stick to simpler terms to avoid errors like this.

Several upsets: Our crusade against “multiple” isn’t over yet, as a headline we wrote demonstrated last week. “Multiple bombs rain down on Ukraine in dashcam footage,” we said. Sigh. Even though many of our writers use “multiple” and “several” interchangeably, “multiple” just sounds much clunkier.

Speaking of upsets, we misspelt Nuremberg (incorrectly written as “Nuremburg”) last week when we mentioned the historic trials in a story about Russia’s attack on a Ukraine power station. I think it’s only right that we get the spelling of an important moment, er, right. We’ve corrected the spelling error on our website.