Mea Culpa: Unique and nothing more

Liam James struggles to quantify errors made last week in The Independent

‘Say hello to my little friend’: Al Pacino, 84, is expecting a child (Getty)

We confronted readers with a quantitative paradox in an editorial on Wednesday. The article was concerned with an advisory letter, published in The Independent, from ex-Bank of England governor Mervyn King to his former employee Rachel Reeves ahead of her first Budget.

We established that it was “rare” for an ex-governor to openly advise on government policy. In the next sentence, we attempted to play off this description by calling King’s use of an open letter to communicate with the chancellor “even more unique”.

Our use of “even more” was an unfortunate attempt to modify the quantity implied by a word that has a set value. “Unique” is used to describe single events or objects and will not be bothered by adjectives trying to ascribe to it any greater or lesser intensity.

What’s worse, we suggested that rare and unique were interchangeable. Something rare may be seldom seen but it has no reason to feel all alone. A polar bear is a rare sight and it can be identified by the set of features unique to its species. We meant unusual, as Roger Thetford pointed out.

Doctor, doctor: In a story echoing the terrible crimes against Gisele Pelicot in France, we used a doctor’s analysis to give credence to a woman’s claim to have been drugged by her boyfriend. The order of words we used to present this left us implicating her poor doctor in the crime.

We wrote that Jane, the woman in question, “had little faith that she’d ever see justice. But with the confirmation that she was likely drugged by a doctor … she is now feeling able to confront and move past her trauma.”

A doctor confirmed that Jane was likely drugged. We have no reason to suspect this professional was involved in the drugging. This could be cleared up, as it later was, by rearranging the sentence.

The father, the son and Al Pacino: A comment piece advising Al Pacino to temper his delight in expecting a child while in his eighties gave readers much to think about – though some might have got stuck on the headline, which on our homepage was rendered confusingly: “Being a new dad at 84 won’t be ‘fun’ for your son, Al Pacino”.

In our attempt to tease the article’s contents in a tight word count, we left open a few possibilities as to who was being addressed. It could be understood that Al Pacino has an 84-year-old son who is soon to become a father, or that the elderly father of a child named Al Pacino was being rather selfish.

Readers will surely have landed on the intended meaning of the headline but not before having their powers of deduction tested in a fashion they might reasonably expect to encounter only in the puzzle pages.

Travel chaos: Some train-related wordplay in an article on leaked plans for HS2 cruelly raised hopes that Britain’s rail network was on track for a surprising new capacity. We said the troubled rail scheme was “freighted with high hopes” – an accomplished pun at first glance. But Philip Nalpanis pointed out that HS2 is fated to carry passenger trains only, exposing this pun’s failure to link together two relevant ideas.

Later in the article, we said the revived “2a” section of the line – which would run from Birmingham to Crewe – was the “cheaper of all options”. Thanks to Philip for pointing out that, given the many options available, the one carrying the lowest cost would be the cheapest.