Mea Culpa: in the middle of the campaign against ‘amid’

John Rentoul’s self-critical look at English usage and abusage in last week’s ‘Independent’

Ronan Kelleher suffered a double linguistic injury at the hands of ‘The Independent’ this week (Getty)

My campaign against “amid” has been suspended for a while, to give everyone a chance to familiarise themselves with normal English words to use instead. But I am afraid a computer search tells me we used it 35 times in the last week, and only two of those were remotely acceptable.

We said that Rishi Sunak “will be staying at the five-star Shangri-La Hotel in central Connaught Place, along with the rest of his delegation from the UK, amid high security and restrictions for the national capital’s residents”. I think that is fine, as the prime minister was literally “in the middle of” a security zone.

And we said that Irina Babloyan, a broadcaster popular in Russia, “returned to her home country of Georgia in October, amid another Russian exodus sparked by President Putin’s mobilisation order”. In that case, she was figuratively “in the midst” of a crowd of emigrants.

No excuses for the other 33 instances. Two examples stood out. We said that Gary Younge, the writer and journalist, “comes back to Henley [literary festival] amid the release of his latest book”. We meant “to promote”. And we said that Ronan Kelleher, a rugby player, “sat out last month’s wins over Italy, England and Samoa amid a hamstring issue”. We meant “because of”. And we meant injury, not issue.

Either/or: A headline on a report of Daniel Khalife’s capture read: “Escaped Wandsworth prisoner ‘had help’ as terror suspect laughed during arrest.” Thanks to Paul Edwards for pulling us up on a classic use of the journalese “as” to join two unrelated aspects of the story. I can almost hear a news editor asking: “What is the top line of this story?” “You can either have that Khalife had help, or that he laughed when he was arrested.” “Those are both good, let’s stick them both in the headline.” We should have chosen one or the other.

Ambiguity warning: Another headline problem is compression causing ambiguity with verbs. We had this last weekend: “Sunak warned benefit cuts would be ‘morally bankrupt’.” John Harrison wrote to say that he had to read it twice to realise that it was short for “Sunak is warned…”, and that it was not the prime minister who was doing the warning.

Not so deep: We used “epicentre” correctly a few times in one of our reports of the earthquake in Morocco, saying it was “reported to be in the Ighil area, about 70km (40 miles) south of Marrakech”. As we got closer, however, we slipped up: “It was said to be about 18km below the Earth’s surface by the US Geological Survey.” Thanks to John Schluter for reminding us that the epicentre is the point on the Earth’s surface directly above the focus of a quake.

Greenland news: In one of our reports about the luxury cruise ship that ran aground in Alpefjord, an inlet on the coast of Greenland, we said it was “about 240km (149 miles) away from the closest settlement, Ittoqqortoormiit, which itself is 1,400km from the country’s capital, Nuuk”.

Roger Thetford wrote to ask if Greenland is really a country. It is an autonomous territory, and it can be called one of the three countries that makes up the Kingdom of Denmark (Denmark itself and the Faroe Islands being the other two), but a news report should avoid the term, which implies an independent sovereign state. Nor should we translate “about 240km” as 149 miles, because 149 is “about” 150.

Mea maxima culpa: One of the occupational hazards of writing a column about errors is Muphry’s Law: “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” In last week’s column I wrote that “a crore is 10 lakhs”, trying to correct a mistake in our use of Indian numbers. That should have been “100 lakh”. One lakh is 100,000, and one crore is 10 million. And although many Indians add an “s” for the plurals of lakh and crore, the usual form is without.