Mea Culpa: Special delivery

Susanna Richards gathers up the editorial shortcomings in last week’s Independent and gently shushes them to sleep

Multiple births are not altogether uncommon, but the term does not generally refer to being born more than once (Getty )

We published a touching, though slightly peculiar, article on Christmas Day, in which we listed the names and weights of this year’s cohort of festive babies (if babies can ever really be described as such, unless they are adorned with tinsel). The headline we used was a herald of the confusion to follow, as it proudly declared: “Christmas miracle as twins born on different days after arriving weeks early.”

It appeared to indicate that there had indeed been some kind of miracle, or at least an anachronism in the usual order of proceedings, with the babies in question having “arrived” at some point before being born. The subheadline was equally baffling, though this was largely down to the order in which we had decided to present the information. “Both, with their mother, will stay in hospital for a few days, staff said, but hope to be out by Hogmanay,” we wrote.

Our sub-editors are conditioned to avoid the use of punctuation in page furniture, and especially its overuse; the inclusion of four commas can safely be called excessive. It almost felt like one of those puzzles in which the reader is required to rearrange a series of phrases into a coherent sentence. And I’m almost certain that no one had actually asked the poor wee tots when they were hoping to go home.

As well as that, “Hogmanay” is a word that will not be familiar to some of our readers – a show of hands among my consultative committee (whose name has been withheld for his own protection) seems to support this assumption – and so we should have used the more familiar term, regardless of the births having taken place in Scotland. Ultimately, it ought to have said something like “The babies will stay in hospital with their mother for a few days but staff hope they will be home by new year”.

As if all this were not enough, the article itself made mention of the fact that they would “not share the same birthdays”, giving rise to further questions about the number of occasions on which these infants had been born. And the whole stramash was topped off by a picture caption in which we managed to spell “left” with two Fs and got one of their names wrong. Not our finest moment.

Phantom zone: In a report about the discovery of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in a location “above the Arctic Circle” – a phrase that conjures an image of him floating in mid-air, which ties in quite neatly with the Putin critic’s reported self-characterisation as a modern-day Santa Claus – we said: “Supporters believed he was deliberately being hidden after Putin announced his candidacy in Russia’s March presidential election.”

It was a subtle error, but the phrase “deliberately being hidden” seemed to suggest that Navalny himself had requested that his whereabouts remain unknown. It was changed to “being deliberately hidden”, which puts the blame firmly in the court of those who were allegedly trying to hide him.

Clothed all in green-O: An article about the royal family’s trip to church on Christmas morning contained the newsworthy snippet: “Another feature this year was the appearance of Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew’s former wife, in a green coat and green boots for the first time since 1991.” It transpired that the date referred to the last time she had been present at the occasion at all, not just while wearing those particular garments.

The sentence would have been clearer with a comma after “boots”, but the details of what she had on, and what colour it was, could have been omitted entirely without detracting from the piece. As indeed could rather a lot of the information contained therein, but it is not our place to opine on such matters.

Lost in the bewilderness: We attempted to coin a new word in a report of a Boxing Day football match, in which we wrote: “For quite some time though, it was not so cheery in the Liverpool dugout. More VAR controversy and perplexment ensued at Turf Moor.” Reader Roger Thetford was kind enough to alert us to this neologism, and it was duly changed to “perplexity”, though I quite like “perplexment”. In my somewhat jaded view, there can never be too many words to describe a state of mind that is, for some of us at least, fairly constant.

Fair cop: There was a lovely malapropism in a comment piece that expressed dismay at the popularity of a certain “seasonal” film. “Die Hard is without a doubt one of the biggest cinematic mis-sellings ever,” we said. “It is an absolute travesty of a Christmas movie. It’s about as Christmassy as sitting on a Seychelles beach with a rum punch in your hand. Die Hard is, let’s be honest, the very antonym of Christmas.”

The word we were after was “antithesis”, which means a thing that is the opposite of another thing; an antonym is a word that means the opposite of another word. It is as well that an off-duty sub-editor was hiding in the building, ready to save the day.

Until next year, or next week as it is otherwise known. Yippee-ki-yay and all that.