Whose army might have invaded central London?

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

‘So if you’re not the German or French army, you must be...’ – ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’

We reported, in “Home news in brief” in the Daily Edition, the evacuation of Soho after a Second World War bomb was found. There is a Soho in New York, although that is usually written SoHo, for “South of Houston Street”, but our report made clear that this was in central London, and even gave the street names.

Yet we went on to say that the bomb “was removed by the British army”. As Gordon Whitehead wrote to ask, which other army might have taken it away?

The bells, the bells: In our review of Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard’s new play, we said of the character Fritz that, “with a horribly playful satisfaction, he puts Hermann through the ringer of humiliation twice over”. As Iain Boyd pointed out, we meant wringer, a device for squeezing water out of wet clothes. We still wring our hands, but the wringer (sometimes called a mangle) is an obsolete technology, and so you can see why we might sometimes go for the more familiar spelling, of a device that rings a bell.