Mea Culpa: The whiching hour

Susanna Richards decides it’s all relative in last week’s Independent

Witchcraft is not recommended as a method to determine the right word to use in copy. That is what the style guide is for (Getty)

Using the wrong relative pronoun is perhaps one of the most frequent errors to be found in our writing, and perhaps it is time we sorted it out. In a comment piece about the terrorist attack in Moscow last week, we used the word “which” seven times, but four or five of those whiches were misplaced.

In general, “which” is used to denote additional or subsidiary information, while “that” is a marker of direct relevance – indicating something that we cannot leave out because it is central to what we are saying. So, for instance, when we wrote about the tense atmosphere brought about by current conflicts, we should have described it as “the mistrust and recriminations in international relations that [not which] two major wars, in Ukraine and Gaza, have engendered”. You can tell that this is not subsidiary information, because without the reference to the wars, the reader would be left wondering what mistrust and recriminations we meant.

Conversely, in an item in “World news in brief”, we said that the Slovakian presidential candidate Peter Pellegrini “heads the left-wing Hlas (Voice) party that finished third in the 30 September parliamentary election”. This misuse of the word “that” affords too much relevance to the information about the election result, thereby implying the existence of another Hlas party – one that did not finish third in the election. It was replaced with a comma after “party” and a “which” – goodness knows we had enough of them lying around after extricating them from the article about Moscow.

Tread carefully: Reader Richard Parry wrote to tell us that we might have made Borodin chuckle in another piece about Russia, where we wrote that “the seeds of the murders in the Moscow concert hall had been sown in Chechnya and [the] central Asian steps”. That should have said steppes, referring to the large, treeless plains found in the region. We live and learn.

Oh, there she is: A headline on our homepage last week – “Prince Harry and Meghan ‘discovered princess’ diagnosis on television’” – drew attention for the wrong reason: the absence of an “s” after the apostrophe, which made it look like a quotation mark. Given the line break after “discovered princess”, it initially seemed to suggest that the Sussexes had located a long-lost royal relative lurking in the California wilderness.

At this point, we should probably ask the court to take some further offences into consideration – specifically, our insistence on pluralising the Waleses with a possessive apostrophe (“Carole Middleton keeps Wales’s together after Kate’s cancer diagnosis”) and, in the same article, referring to “A source close to the Middleton’s”. I do not wish to malign our dedicated reporters, whose work involves so much more than fretting about apostrophes, but this is basic stuff, and we really should be able to get it right.

Calm down, dear: We briefly took on the tone of a tabloid newspaper in yet another headline about the Princess of Wales. “Latest conspiracies slammed”, we exclaimed, leaving no doubt as to the strength of disapproval. It is not our style to use such terms; we believe that the news can speak for itself and does not need to be given a helping hand in order to make an impression on the reader. Words such as “criticised”, “condemned” and “denounced” are available and convey the same meaning without the undertones of violence.

With friends like these: We started a report about Russia’s latest misdemeanours with a sentence that appeared to attribute them to an innocent party. “Poland has demanded an explanation from Moscow after a Russian cruise missile violated its airspace as it launched an attack on western Ukraine,” we wrote. Obviously, it was Moscow that had launched the attack on Ukraine, but a casual reader could have gained the impression that Poland had been interrupted while doing so. Something like “Poland has demanded an explanation after a Russian cruise missile violated its airspace during an attack launched by Moscow on western Ukraine” would have been clearer.

A similar thing occurred in one of our US news reports, which was headlined: “Son of Oath Keepers’ leader jailed for Jan 6 riot announces he’s running for office as a Democrat”. “Who was jailed – the father or the son?” wrote reader Henry Peacock. Well, quite.

Make room for the mushrooms: “Silicone Valley executives ... have talked openly about using psilocybin,” we wrote in an article about the healing properties of hallucinogenic fungi. I think that was supposed to say “Silicon”, as in the substance used to manufacture computer chips, but perhaps our writer was too relaxed to notice the difference. I suppose we can caulk it up to experience (sorry).

Ovine intervention: We were alerted by a veritable flock of readers to a caption in our “Pictures of the day” feature, which read “Cattle amid the battle”. This would have been quite apt had the image not appeared to show a number of sheep – albeit rather fancy ones with unusually long ears; indeed, it was suggested that they might be goats, but nobody was really sure. Either way, they did not look anything like cows, so I am unsure how the mistake was made (though I am as confident as I can be that no mushrooms were involved).

The work of a sub-editor does not normally require a solid grasp of the differences between animal species, but a passing familiarity with the subject can help in situations like this, and we will be providing a brief refresher course. Until next time, do keep the letters coming – and watch out for the whiches.