Mea Culpa: like Arnie, we badly needed a total recall

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

Painful memories: Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1990 sci-fi thriller ‘Total Recall’ (StudioCanal/Shutterstock)

Once I notice an unnecessary phrase, it seems to crop up everywhere. We reported that Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, trying to convince people that he is battling bravely and relentlessly against fraud in Covid-19 support schemes, claimed that “a total of 80 arrests have been made so far”. We were borrowing his words, which were reported in full later in the article, but we did not need “a total of”.

It was only then that I noticed that we said in our report of the rebellion against Keir Starmer’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza: “A total of 10 members of the Labour leader’s front bench resigned or were sacked…” Elsewhere we said that, “according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza” (a correct and scrupulous qualification about the source of the information), “a total of 32 patients have died since al-Shifa’s emergency generator ran out of fuel on Saturday”. And finally, we said: “The National Police Chiefs’ Council revealed that London’s police force will be bolstered by a total of 1,000 extra officers across the weekend…”

In each case, we could have simply deleted “a total of”. It may be that we didn’t want to start a sentence with a number, but our style is to spell those out. “Ten members of the front bench…” would have been fine.

Frost in France: A caption on one of our Pictures of the Day last Saturday took us on an unexpected journey: “Greenpeace activists stand next to a giant octopus as they demonstrate against deep sea mining in the Arctic in Paris.” Thanks to John Harrison for pointing out that we seemed to have moved Paris to the Arctic or the Arctic to Paris, when what we should have done is move the words “in Paris” to after the octopus.

On your metal: In a fascinating article about the discovery of an ancient language we slipped up in talking about “the invention of iron” by the Hittite empire in the second millennium BC. We meant “the use of iron”, or “the invention of ironworking”, which allowed, as we said, the development of lightweight war chariots and the creation of ever-larger empires. Thanks to Roger Thetford for spotting that one.

Miscommunication: Here is a sentence from our coverage of the meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping in San Francisco, which was the first between the leaders of the US and China since 2017: “Relations between the two superpowers have dropped since then, and Trump wasn’t exactly known for being quiet when it came to the issue of China, and so this discussion will be more about breathing life into lines of communication that have grown fallow.”

I think that we needed to start with Donald Trump and his noisy assertion that he was the kind of leader that Xi respected, preferably avoiding the dead phrases “when it came to” and “the issue of”. Then we should have moved on to say that relations between the superpowers have weakened, rather than “dropped”. Perhaps we were thinking ahead to the “lines of communication” and suggesting that they had “dropped” like a bad phone connection. Finally we needed to explain that the present discussion is about reopening lines of communication that have fallen into disuse, preferably without mixing metaphors.

As it was, we were “breathing life” into something that was also a field with no crops in it. Fields do not “grow” fallow, they are left to lie fallow, but a field is not a good metaphor for a channel of communication anyway, so we should have rewritten it.

Undignified vehicle: The caption on a photo accompanying a report from Ukraine claimed that it showed “a remote-controlled demeaning vehicle GCS 200” working in a field near the village of Kamianka, which seemed a rather unfair way of describing the brave and even noble task of clearing minefields. How we arrived at this way of spelling a demining vehicle is a mystery.