Mea Culpa: rejected by the foreign secretary’s lookalikes

Questions of style and language in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

‘Psst. I’m not really Liz Truss, I’m just like her. Pass it on’ (AP)

No one is very interested any more in the Committee of Privileges investigation into whether the prime minister knowingly misled parliament about lockdown parties. But when they were, at the beginning of the week, Boris Johnson’s allies were calling it a “kangaroo court”, and we wrote: “Any such suggestion has been refuted by cabinet ministers like Liz Truss.”

Yes, I know that it is pedantic to insist that “refute” means “disprove”, because it comes from the Latin refutare, which means reject or repel. But if we mean “reject” why not use that and deny the pedants their day in court?

While we are in court, though, we don’t mean “cabinet ministers like Liz Truss”, we mean Liz Truss, so that should be “such as”. Ideally.

Spinning ramp: Marvellous financial reporting jargon in our business news in brief: “Thames Water is making a £1.5bn investor cash call to help ramp up turnaround efforts as it looks to move on from a string of fines.” The company seems to be calling, helping, ramping up, turning round, looking and moving on, all in one short sentence. I think it means: “Thames Water is asking investors for £1.5bn to turn the company around after a string of fines.”

Everything must go: We are sometimes guilty of that old sales trick of describing price cuts as “up to 50 per cent off”. The eager shopper, expecting all prices to be halved, is disappointed to discover that most prices have been cut by 10 per cent and some haven’t been cut at all. We said in a report on floods in Australia: “Some parts of New South Wales have received rainfall of up to 700mm since Saturday.” As we said “some parts”, we did not need the “up to”, as long as there was at least one part which got 700mm of rain.

We did something similar in a report of a possible change in childcare ratios: “Doing so has the potential to reduce the cost of childcare by up to 15 per cent, or up to £40 per week.” If the change has the “potential” for a cut of that much, we didn’t need the “up to”.

Talking ’bout degeneration: In an interesting explanation of why an attack on modern art, saying it was “time to take back the culture from degenerates”, upset so many people, we said “the use of the word ‘degenerate’ recalled the famous 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition organized by the Nazi party to mock similar works”. We should have deleted the word “famous”: if you know about the 1937 exhibition, you don’t need to be told, and if, like me, you didn’t know, you don’t want The Independent implying that you are ignorant.

We did the same with “ Mumbai’s famous street food”. And with a TV review in which we described “Be All You Can Be” as “the famous slogan, often held up as one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time”. In which case we had explained succinctly why it was well known, so we really didn’t need the f-word.

Time for a treat: Whoever put this headline on the story of the chickpea shortage should know that their efforts are appreciated: “Hummus supplies dip due to war and climate crisis.” Give them a celery rise.