Mea Culpa: friends and family at border control

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

Keep on running: it was acceptable to talk about Kevin Sinfield being encouraged by the ‘loved ones’ of people with motor neurone disease as he completed a series of fundraising marathons (PA)

We used the phrase “loved ones” in a front-page story on Tuesday about the government’s plan to reduce legal immigration, which we said included banning “overseas social care staff from bringing loved ones to the UK”.

The phrase actually used by James Cleverly, the home secretary, in his statement was “family dependants”, which is ungainly, but we could just say “family” or “relatives”. Not only is “loved ones” twee, the wrong tone for a serious news report, it is also imprecise.

You can see why journalists use “loved ones” in articles about Christmas presents and seasonal activities, where we want to include people who are treated as family even if they are not actually related. Even then, I would prefer, having become sensitised to “loved ones”, to use a phrase such as “family and friends”.

But in the case of our news report, as I understand it the law on visas defines a “family dependant” as a spouse, partner or child, so any old “loved one” would not qualify anyway.

In passing: We also mentioned a “loved one” in an article about Kevin Sinfield, the rugby player inspired to raise money for motor neurone disease charities by his former teammate Rob Burrow, diagnosed with the disease four years ago: “Sinfield says he is stopped three times a day by someone telling him about a loved one they know who has MND or who has passed away.” I think “loved one” is acceptable there, but I would avoid “passed away”, which is a euphemism. Our readers are made of sterner stuff, and can cope with “died”.

Latin lesson: In “home news in brief” on Wednesday we had an old pedants’ favourite: “Injuries to her right arm and right thumb included one wound entering the bicep and exiting the outside of the arm below the shoulder.” As Roger Thetford reminded us, biceps is singular. The Latin plural is bicipites, as Guy Keleny, my predecessor as author of this column, once told us, but in English we usually use “biceps” as both the singular and the plural.

Up and down the countries: Our report of the Pisa international pupil rankings was “a bit convoluted”, said John Harrison. It made sense when he had read it all, but the opening sentence was a struggle: “British pupils’ gains in maths and reading declined following the pandemic.”

There must have been a better way of saying that UK performance went down, but not as much as that of most other countries, so the UK went up in the rankings.

At sixes and ones: In our “on this day” feature on Tuesday, we said that the Preston bypass, Britain’s first section of motorway, was officially opened by Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, on that day in 1958. Unfortunately we said it is part of the M1. Henry Peacock, who lives in Preston, pointed out that it is part of the M6.

Misdiagnosis: In last week’s column I diagnosed a bad case of “amiditis”, when we wrote about people returning to a town in Iceland “amid” a warning of an imminent volcanic eruption. Bashingon, a fellow doctor of pedantry, suggested that the correct term should be “amidosis”. The condition is a disease or an excess (–osis), rather than an inflammation (–itis).