Mea Culpa: big-scale, wide-scale, upscale – let the scales fall from our prose

John Rentoul reviews language and usage in last week’s Independent

Oh dear: don’t get your antlers in a tangle over animal plurals (Getty)

In a headline about the early evidence of a fifth wave of coronavirus in the UK we said “fears mount over large scale summer events”. It is a curious thing about journalists that we seem to be afraid of the word “big”. Perhaps we think it is too simple – childish even – and so we use circumlocutions such as “large-scale” instead. We meant Glastonbury and Wimbledon, which are big events, so we could just call them that.

We did the same referring to “large-scale cattle ranches established on cleared forest land” in the Amazon basin. A ranch is defined by the Oxford dictionary as “a large farm” (from Spanish rancho, a group of people eating together), so it doesn’t need the adjective.

And a similar thing happened in an editorial, which said that, at the time of the last general election, “no one would have predicted that there would be a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia less than three years later”. We needed to distinguish it from the covert invasion of parts of Ukraine by local proxies that had already happened, but a simple “full invasion” would have sufficed.

I know I allowed an “upscale” through the other day, but really, adding “-scale” to the end of words is a bad idea.

Modest destruction: We used “decimate” three times last week, in brazen defiance of a Banned List order in existence for at least a decade. A decade is another word that comes from the Latin for 10, and “decimate” originally meant to cut by one-tenth. But when we said that “crops can be decimated” by heat waves that will become more frequent as the climate crisis worsens, we meant that they can be destroyed altogether.

Similarly, when we spoke of “witnessing Poland, the US, Malta and many other countries decimate a woman’s right to abortion”, we did not mean reducing the number of women allowed to have an abortion by one-tenth. Nor in a cycling report in which we wrote that “too many disqualifications would decimate the field” did we mean that only one in 10 riders would be excluded.

Of course, “decimate” is widely used as a synonym for “destroy”, but as long as there are pedants around who are sensitive to the word’s original meaning, we should avoid it. It is not as if there is a shortage of words meaning demolish, dismantle, ruin, eliminate, devastate and wreck after all.

Many animal: In further climate news, we reported – briefly, before it was changed – that “extreme drought is stopping Texas deers from growing full-sized antlers”. The usual plural of a deer is deer, like a sheep and sheep. We had this problem when factory-farmed mink in Denmark were infected with coronavirus, because with less familiar animals the plural form is less well established. But about deer there is no doubt.

Puppet villain: In an article about Mick Lynch, the trade union leader whose plausible manner on TV has made him an accidental hero, we made fun of Piers Morgan, who took seriously Lynch’s use of an image of The Hood on his Facebook page. Morgan described the Thunderbirds baddie as “the world’s most dangerous man, who wrecked utter carnage and havoc on the public”. I don’t watch Morgan on principle, so I don’t know if he said “wrecked” or “wreaked”, which come from the same Germanic root but which have diverged a little in meaning and pronunciation. But he meant “wreaked”, which is the word we should have used.