Mea Culpa: high on our own resupply

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

Under attack: the bridge connecting the Russian mainland and the Crimean peninsula over the Kerch Strait (AP)

In an article about possible Ukrainian drone attacks on the Kerch Bridge, we described the bridge as a “resupply route”. How does that differ from a supply route, Mick O’Hare wanted to know. I suppose any route, once it has provided troops with the first lot of supplies, is a resupply route. We should have done without the “re”.

Former patriot: We had an “ex-pat” in an article by a British person now living in Hawaii, writing about the wildfires there. Thanks to John Schluter for prompting us to change it. “Expat” is short for “expatriate”, meaning someone who lives outside (“ex”) their home country. The joke is that it means someone who used to be patriotic but isn’t any more, so they’ve moved, but the “ex” in this case does not mean “former”.

Convolution reigns: George Orwell would have had something to say about this sentence last Saturday: “To say that confusion now reigns regarding where Britain stands in relation to pursuit of its climate agenda is an understatement.” This is a simple idea conveyed in convoluted language. In particular, “regarding” and “in relation to” are deadening verbiage. Cut, cut, cut.

Then there is “pursuit”, which seems an energetic approach to the abstraction of an “agenda”. We could have just said “confusion now reigns about Britain’s climate policies”.

Language trouble: In a report on Thursday about fake signs on Majorcan beaches warning tourists to stay away, we wrote: “While the warnings are written in English, there is small text written in the local Catalan dialect…” Not tactful, as Richard Hanson-James pointed out. Catalan is a language in its own right, and indeed has its own dialects. The implication, that it is a dialect of Spanish, would not go down well with most Catalonians. We deleted “the local” and “dialect”.

Who hung whom? This was the first sentence of a comment article about the prime minister’s ambiguous ideological identity: “When Nigel Lawson died in April, Rishi Sunak was quick to recall that one of his first acts as chancellor was to hang a picture of his Thatcher-era predecessor above his desk.” Thanks to Nigel Fox for pointing out that it is unclear whether it was Lawson or Sunak who did the hanging. The problem is that the “his” of “his first acts” attaches itself to the first person named, when it really belongs to the second.

There is no elegant way round this, so we changed it to “... Rishi Sunak was quick to recall that when he, Sunak, became chancellor, one of his first acts was …” The alternative would be to rewrite the sentence completely: something like “When Nigel Lawson died in April, Rishi Sunak was quick to recall that his picture hangs above the chancellor’s desk”, and then add, in a second sentence, that putting the picture up had been one of Sunak’s first acts as chancellor, which would also get rid of the awkward “Thatcher-era predecessor”.

Over the edge: In one of many recent reports on the loss of Antarctic ice, we said that “sea-ice formation has dropped off a cliff”. John Armitage thought this might not be the right metaphor, as the ice itself forms cliffs. As ever, it is clear enough what we meant, but anything that causes the reader to read something twice should be changed, even if it is to something as plain as “sea ice formation has slowed drastically”.