Mea Culpa: Scuttlebutt and American English in the US presidential election

John Rentoul on questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Donald Trump, whose election defeat continues to produce language irregularities (Getty)

I am against the use of the American “likely” in The Independent, as in this recent headline: “We likely haven’t seen the last of Dominic Cummings.” In British English, we would say “probably” or “It is likely that we haven’t”. 

In this case, though, it was worse than that, because the headline actually said, paraphrasing the view of Andrew Grice: “I would bet we likely haven’t seen the last of Dominic Cummings.” Not only an Americanism but a redundant one. The headline now reads: “I would bet we haven’t seen the last of Dominic Cummings.”

Inadvertent conspiracy theory: In an article looking back at the US election, we wrote: “Trump must know that had he made tackling the pandemic his government’s priority, rather than worrying about the stock market, he may indeed have been re-elected.” When Paul Edwards pointed it out, we changed the “may” to “might”. 

By using “may” we were suggesting that the result of the election is still unknown, and that Donald Trump could have won – a view that would quite rightly be tagged as “contested” on social media. 

We often mix “may” and “might” up, and the intended meaning was clear enough here, but we should not force the reader to pause to make sure. 

Rumour and gossip: I am still catching up with some of our coverage of the US election, and a reader who asked what “scuttlebutt” meant. We had reported “scuttlebutt in Washington about talk in the president’s inner circle about a possible intervention to convince him to concede”. Weeks later, he still hasn’t, but my view is that scuttlebutt is an excellent word, meaning rumour or gossip, derived according to the Oxford Dictionary from a scuttled butt, a butt of drinking water on the deck of a ship: “Sailors would traditionally exchange gossip when they gathered at the scuttlebutt for a drink of water.”  

We ought to use it more often. 

Round the world: We used “ouster” twice in our foreign coverage last weekend. John Stanley wrote to ask if it should be “ousting”. I thought ouster was Indian English, so I wasn’t surprised to see it in an agency report from Thailand, but the other report was from Peru, and according to the Oxford Dictionary it is North American English. 

It is not on the Banned List, but I think the picture caption on the Thailand story should have said: “A protester attends a rally to call for the ousting of prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha’s government.” 

Getting ratioed: We got our ratios in a twist this week, reporting that a hospital trust was accused of putting lives at risk by “raising the nurse-to-patient ratio to dangerously high levels”. This was swiftly changed to “patient-to-nurse ratio”, but not before Philip Nalpanis emailed to point out that we had it the wrong way round. As he said, a high ratio is one that has a high number first and a low number second. 

It might have been better to change the headline to “dangerously low levels”, because later in the report we still gave the ratios in the nurse-to-patient format, “one nurse to 10 patients (1:10) for all general adult wards”.