Mea Culpa: Cricket, squeezed through the rollers

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

Hung out to dry: the ins and outs of Joe Root, England captain (PA Wire)

I gather that I am fortunate to have avoided being emotionally involved in cricket. “Cricket in England was put through the ringer” in 2021, we declared in a subheadline last week. This is what happens when no one has a mangle: we no longer know what a wringer is, and the familiar metaphor becomes detached from its origins and its original spelling.

Thanks to Iain Boyd for spotting this one. A wringer (or a mangle) wrings out clothes, squeezing them between two rollers, from Old English wringan, related to Dutch wringen, squeeze or twist, and nothing to do with bells.

Do not disturb: John Schluter wrote to point out our report of “a block of flats decimated by fire”. There is never a good reason to use “decimate”, which needlessly stirs the hornets’ nest of pedantry because it originally meant cut by one-tenth. Unusually, this was a news agency report, which you would have expected to use plain English. “Destroyed” would have been fine.

Wrong password: “Most government departments wipe phones after multiple password attempts,” we said in a headline on a report of claims that officials were using this security feature as a way to avoid disclosing information. I have complained before about the use of “multiple” to mean “several”, but here I think the word we wanted was “repeated”.

Uncountable: In one of our reports of the pressures on the NHS we got our numbers in a right Priti Patel (she once told a Downing Street briefing that “three hundred thousand thirty four, nine hundred and seventy four thousand tests” had been carried out in the UK). We reported that the East Midlands Ambulance Service had said it had “received a ‘record-breaking’ 1,714,999 calls in the first seven hours of 2022”. It looked as if someone had written “1,714 999 calls” and someone else had made the confusion worse. We finally changed it to what it should have been: “1,714 calls via the 999 service”.

Brace, brace: A report of research into the effect of urban air pollution began: “A pair of new studies…” As Keith Bennett pointed out, the studies in question are in no way linked, so we could have said: “Two new studies…” A good example of a journalist thinking that plain English is dull and that any variation is therefore more interesting. This is not necessarily so.

Journalese: I haven’t railed against “amid” so far this year, but we had a striking example in our main headline on the website on Thursday: “Boris Johnson apologises for failure to reveal flat refurbishment texts, amid watchdog’s condemnation.” The prime minister’s apology did not drop out of a blue sky in the middle of the watchdog condemning him for something else. The apology was a response to the condemnation. “After” would have been fine. But “Boris Johnson apologises to watchdog for failing to reveal flat refurbishment texts” would perhaps have been more direct.