Mea Culpa: sleepwalking into a well-worn cliche

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

An eye-opener... Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations (AP)

Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, said the opposite of what we reported he said in a headline: “UN chief says world ‘sleepwalking into wider war’ in Ukraine.” The news article itself quoted his actual words: “I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war. I fear it is doing so with its eyes wide open.”

It shows the power of cliche: that even when someone refers to a well-worn phrase in order to invert it, the hasty editor assumes that it is being used in its well-worn sense. Thanks to Teri Walsh for pointing it out. In our defence, Sky News did the same.

Go forth and use several instead: Is it too soon for another attack on “multiple”? Linda Beeley wrote to say that its use seems to be, er, multiplying everywhere, not just in The Independent. But she referred to two examples that were in our pages in the past few days. We said: “Multiple coroners investigating the deaths of nine patients since 2021 have repeatedly called on the NHS and ministers to improve services to prevent more.” And we referred to “a man being admitted to hospital multiple times while on a six-month waiting list for therapy”. The first we didn’t need, and the second could have been “several”.