Mea Culpa: Nowhere fast

Susanna Richards wonders where everyone is going in last week’s Independent

Prog shock: a visitor to a future world marvels at the improvement in charging facilities (Getty)

We had an interesting subheadline last week on a comment piece about the difficulty of using an electric car for long journeys, in which we remarked that the writer was “getting frustrated that progress seems to be going backwards”. It was easy enough to understand the meaning – and the headline “Are EVs losing their spark?” was lovely – but it felt like a bit of a contradiction in terms.

“Progress” has a Latin origin and means literally “walk forwards”, though I suppose it could be used, as a verb, to indicate a change in direction rather than a reversal as such, for instance in an instruction issued by a driving instructor to “progress in a rearward manner [into the marked space/while avoiding nearby obstacles/until the vehicle is clear of vegetation]” (let’s just say some people are better editors than drivers). I still think it makes for an awkward phrase, though, and that we should have said something else instead – perhaps just that “progress seems to have stalled”.

Roaming numerals: In a report about measures being introduced in Venice to protect the city from overtourism, we wrote that it had “hosted almost 13 million tourists in 2019 and the numbers of visitors are expected to rise even further in the coming years”. That should have said “the number of visitors is”, but some of our writers have a strange habit of using the plural “numbers” almost euphemistically, as though a direct statement of the quantity or statistic in question might be a little too stark.