Mea Culpa: warning of a volcanic eruption of amiditis

Crimes against syntax and style in last week’s Independent reported to the court of pedantry, presided over by judge John Rentoul

A large crack amid the road after the Icelandic town of Grindavik was shaken by earthquakes... and grammatical horror (Getty)

A bad case of “amiditis” has been reported to the authorities by Linda Beeley. The first sentence of an article last weekend read: “A sense of trepidation builds on the coach as we are waved through the roadblock that has held back people from returning to the Icelandic town of Grindavik amid an ‘imminent’ volcanic eruption warning.” As Linda said, it is hard to be “amid” a warning, or indeed “amid” something that is imminent. We could have used “during” instead, but really it needed to be rewritten, to say something like “... Grindavik, whose inhabitants have been warned of an ‘imminent’ volcanic eruption”.

When the court of pedantry assembles, I would ask it to take several other offences into consideration. Starting with a report of the “key absences” at the climate conference in Dubai, in which we said: “US president Joe Biden, Chinese president Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin, leaders of the world’s biggest carbon-polluting nations, are all giving the summit a miss amid ongoing geopolitical tensions.” Not just an “amid” but an “ongoing”! “Amid” can usually be replaced with a normal word; “ongoing” can usually be deleted without any loss of meaning. But in this case, the whole clause after the word “summit” can go in the bin. Unspecified “geopolitical tensions” adds nothing.

Bridge too far: As the Elgin marbles/Parthenon sculptures row rumbled on, we got our word order in a twist, saying: “In cancelling his meeting with Mitsotakis, Sunak undermined one of his genuine achievements – rebuilding bridges with EU leaders blown up by Boris Johnson.” It was obvious that we did not mean that the former prime minister had planted bombs under EU leaders, if the reader stopped to think about it, but we should not be making the reader stop to parse sentences. We changed it to “rebuilding bridges with EU leaders after those relationships were blown up by Boris Johnson”.