Mea Culpa: the proof of the pudding is that readers don’t like it

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

Not that Yorkshire folk need any further proof that they live in God’s Own County... (Getty/iStock)

A couple of readers objected to the phrase “the proof is in the pudding” in an article analysing the causes of the decline in Labour Party membership, which include disillusion with Keir Starmer’s support for Israel in Gaza.

As Linda Beeley said, this is a common abbreviation of the phrase, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” She protested that the short version is “meaningless”. I don’t think that is right because everyone knows what it originally meant, and the proof is, in a sense, “in” the pudding.

But if some readers take against a phrase, we don’t get to argue our case, except in this column, by which time it is too late. My argument has always been that we should try to avoid words or phrases that some people think are wrong, even if we think that they may be wrong to think so.

Tom Freeman once put it very well on his blog. He was writing about the difference between “over” a number and “more than”: he didn’t think it mattered but he realised that some people disagreed. “If you have good reason to think that a significant number of your readers care about a certain point of usage and that the value of pleasing them outweighs the risk of vexing other readers who might care differently plus the cost in time of making the needed changes, then go ahead and stick to that rule. Otherwise, do what you like.”

Chaotic scenes: In the same article about Labour’s loss of members, we went on: “Chaotic scenes in the Commons last month saw Sir Keir spared the difficulty of a rebellion by some of his frontbench.” I first read this as saying that some of his frontbenchers had saved Sir Keir from a rebellion but, in fact, we meant that he had been saved from the embarrassment of his frontbenchers rebelling by the procedural device that led to the “chaotic scenes”.

This is the sort of confusion that you get into if you start a sentence with something that cannot see “seeing” things. In this case, we had “chaotic scenes” that “saw” Sir Keir being rescued. “Chaos” and “scenes” are journalistic cliches in any case: in combination, they simply mean that there was an uproar. We needed a complete rewrite: “Sir Keir was spared the embarrassment of a frontbench rebellion last month by the speaker’s controversial ruling on procedure.”

MLK goes missing: The picture caption on the photo leading our “On This Day” feature on Wednesday said: “Martin Luther King was assassinated on this day in 1968.” As John Harrison said, most readers might expect MLK to be in the picture, but it showed several men, presumably FBI agents, including one with a rifle, on the balcony of the hotel where MLK had been shot.

A search of the internet finds that the original photo agency caption was: “The balcony of room #306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead on 3 April 1968.” We probably didn’t need that level of detail, but something like “The balcony of the hotel where Martin Luther King was assassinated on this day in 1968” would have been better.

Upscale language: In an earlier caption, we were guilty of sticking too closely to agency copy, copying out an unfamiliar local term. We referred to “a protest against the non-dairy milk upcharge” outside a Starbucks cafe in Kuala Lumpur. As Henry Peacock pointed out, in British English, we would probably call this a “surcharge”.

Passport to stardom: Several readers pointed out that we referred on Thursday to the County Championship as a “right of passage for every England cricketer”. We meant “rite” of passage, as in ritual. A rite of passage is something that marks a journey, such as from childhood to adulthood, or in this case from county cricket to the national team, whereas a right of passage is permission to travel.