Mea Culpa: You say faucet, I say tap; why can’t we just use both?

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

As an original member of ‘Charlie’s Angels’, Farrah always got a kick out of receiving fan mail from the UK addressed to ‘Ms Tap’ (Getty)

We carried a Reuters report about Tenino in Washington state, which has responded creatively to the coronavirus recession: “Tiny US town prints own currency for Covid relief.” The manager of the hardware store on Main Street said customers had spent $150 in the local banknotes to buy “necessities like groceries and a new faucet to replace a broken tap”.

Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for drawing my attention to this inspired attempt to bridge US and British English by using two words for the same thing in the same sentence.

Unfortunately, the same report started by saying the consequences of the pandemic were “decimating small businesses and causing job losses across the country”. It would be absurd to use “decimate” in its original sense of reducing something by one tenth, but once you know that is what it used to mean, you cannot unknow it, and it feels odd to use the word to mean “destroy a large proportion of”.

That is why it should be avoided altogether. One of the joys of English – British and American – is that it has a wide choice of words and phrases meaning “destroy”.

Journalese amidships: This is getting out of control. We used the word “amid” 59 times last week, according to a search of our database. It is a word that is rarely used in speech, yet journalists write it a lot because it allows them to link two things without having to be sure that they are cause and effect – and because it is short.

In many cases, however, we could have used a more precise word. “Some American states have started reimposing lockdown amid a surge in cases” could have been “because of”. “Officials in Japan have advised millions of people to leave their homes amid severe flooding” could have been “during”. “Amid a furious outcry from [care] home operators and unions, Downing Street made clear that the prime minister was not saying sorry for his remarks” could have been “Despite”. “Amid the submissions, self-employed people asked for the Treasury to tax tech companies more fairly, increase child benefit and supply a universal basic income to help people pay their bills” could have been “Among”.

The word is one of those journalistic tics that signals to the reader “this is a news story”, just as much as putting someone’s age after their name, or starting a report with “The Labour Party was plunged into chaos last night as…”

But it becomes a reflex that ends up producing sentences such as the one in a “business news in brief” item about Vistry Group, a housebuilding company, which “cheered recovering demand amid cautious homebuyers”.

Problem word: In an article about sobriety and the lockdown, we referred to “those who have a problematic relationship with alcohol”. This seems a needlessly long way of saying “a problem with alcohol”. Elsewhere we described 365 Days, the TV show, as not just problematic but “deeply problematic”. Fortunately, the headline said what is wrong with it – that it glamourises sexual violence – but better to say that, especially in the first line of a review, than to use academic jargon that mostly serves to obscure meaning.