Mea Culpa: Friendly fire

Susanna Richards intercepts some errors in last week’s Independent

The troubles of passengers stuck at Dubai international airport (file image) cannot be overstated (Netherlands Institute for Art History)

We excelled ourselves last week in an article discussing the fortunes of Manchester United football club, in which we managed to combine a striking mixed metaphor with a classic misspelling. “Ten Hag remains on a knife edge, hanging by a thread,” we wrote, evoking an image of the kind of peril one might encounter in a book of adventure stories for boys. We continued: “The P45, crucially, remains in Ratcliffe’s draw, under his marathon medal.” That should have been “drawer”, of course, but I expect our writer was too caught up in the excitement to worry about spelling. Thanks to Roger Thetford for telling us about it.

It is always dangerous to make a mistake in any given article in The Independent, because the chances are that whoever happens to be writing this column that week will read the rest of it. It’s a bit like having a medical scan for an existing condition, only to be told that there was an “incidental finding” and you now have something else, too. Thus it became apparent that we had erred once more in the Man United article, this time by way of tautology. “Coventry were playing the badge rather the current, chaotic United incumbent, but they still had their moments in the first half,” we wrote. We did not need to say “current” as that is what “incumbent” means, so back in the draw of spare words it should have gone.

Come follow the banned: In a report about Penny Mordaunt’s views on missile defence systems and the like, we said: “The former defence secretary’s comments come following another precarious week for relations between Israel and Iran.” There are a number of ways to join the two parts of an article in which the context of an incident is explained beneath the main story; probably the most frequent device used by our writers is to begin the second part with “It comes as …”, which means “Just before that happened, this happened, in case you didn’t know.” We might instead use the phrase “It follows …”, which means roughly the same thing, but we shouldn’t try to use both at the same time. The sentence was duly simplified.

Take cover: Talking of missile defence systems, perhaps The Independent would benefit from some sort of alarm that goes off whenever someone tries to type the word “skyrocket”. It’s happened 10 times in the past week, and in some cases our use of what is already a silly word has been exceptionally ill advised. On one occasion, in a report about the alarming situation in the Middle East, we wrote that “tensions between the two countries have skyrocketed since Iran’s ally Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people”. Having just described the rocket attack on Israel by Iran, which involved “hundreds of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles”, we could have been a little more careful in our choice of words.

Basic science: We ran, or perhaps flew, into trouble in our “Pictures of the Day” feature in the Daily Edition last week. “A bumblebee covered in pollen germinates dandelions in Athy, Co Kildare, Ireland,” we said in one of our captions. It was probably supposed to say “pollinates”, but whoever wrote it may have been trying to avoid repetition and lost their way. Thanks again to Roger Thetford. And in another of our captions we referred to “rape fields” when it was immediately obvious that one of the fields in the picture contained a different crop. To be fair, the description that came with that image appeared to have been translated from German, and originally referred to a road as an “alley”, so at least we corrected that.

Measure once, cut twice: We also got in a muddle in a report about a burning rubbish heap in India. “The Ghazipur landfill, which takes up more than 40 football fields and rises to a height of 65m, caught fire on Sunday evening during soaring temperatures in the region,” we wrote, inadvertently giving the impression that it was located in some sort of enormous stadium. It is a habit of journalists to refer to random large objects to try to give an idea of scale, but we should be sure to make clear that the object in question is hypothetical, not literal.

Hell and high water: On the subject of infernos, we had a moment of pure tabloidism in what can fairly be described as an incomprehensible subheadline last week, which read: “The couple have been told they can only escape Dubai airport hell on a flight to Gatwick in three days still landing 230 miles away from their Manchester home.” It referred, of course, to the flooding in the UAE that led to misery for holidaymakers whose planes had been grounded.

Complete with a full stop, it broke a number of rules, and gave our readers a headache in the process as they attempted to understand what, exactly, it was trying to say. But the best part was “Dubai airport hell”, which is the kind of description beloved of red-top newspapers everywhere. It always makes me wonder how many hells there are, other than the usual one – which, as presumably the (under)world headquarters of Perdition Inc, seems to operate franchises in various unfortunate locations.

On that note, I had better go and keep an eye on the infernal content management machine. Till next time.