Mea Culpa: Lots of things are ‘smaller than Dorset’

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

The sun sets over the sea near Durdle Door in the English county of Dorset (Getty)

In an article about ancient rock art in South America, we said: “It’s thought likely that the thousand-square-mile area (smaller than Dorset) may well contain around 10,000 ancient engravings.” As several readers pointed out, the comparison with Dorset was less than helpful. Google tells me that Dorset is in fact 1,024 square miles, so “the size of Dorset” would have been fine, as we are talking about approximations.

At some point, someone had added “the English county of”, which may have been a misguided attempt to be helpful. If the reader is not familiar with Dorset, telling them that it is an English county does not help with the analogy.

Nature note: A photo caption on Friday said: “A puffin feeds on sand eels on the Farne Islands.” As John Harrison pointed out, this was not right, because the picture was of a puffin holding eels in its beak: if it was feeding on them, it would have swallowed them. Presumably, it was going to carry them back to the nest to feed its young.

McTrademark: On Thursday we reported that “McDonald’s has lost its Big Mac trademark in the European Union in favour of Irish fast food rival Supermac’s in a long-running legal battle”. This wasn’t quite right, as you would learn if you read the rest of the report carefully, as Roger Thetford did.

McDonald’s failed to prove that “Supermac” infringes its “Big Mac” trademark, but the company hasn’t lost the “Big Mac” trademark itself.

Epidemiology: “Social media has sparked a viral trend for dishes designed to produce ‘content’ rather than be delicious,” we said last weekend in a sub-headline on an article lamenting style over substance in food. That is quite a mouthful of words to start with, none of which tell us anything very interesting. I think it means “There is a fashion on social media for dishes…”

We tried to spice it up with “sparks” and “viral”, but they don’t make sense. “Sparks” is an easy resort of journalese for one thing causing another, but it is not social media platforms that have caused this trend. Nor did we need to call the trend “viral”, a reference to something “going viral” on social media, meaning it has spread like a virus. The combination of two words is silly, because viruses are not spread by sparks.

Sign of the times: I came across an old Mea Culpa column by Guy Keleny the other day in which he said: “‘Significantly’ should always be struck out.” As I am dimly aware that it is a word I use quite often, I searched for it in the past week’s Independent. Guy had a point. We said the Snuz bedside crib “will take up significantly more room in your bedroom than a more traditional basket”. We did not need “significantly” there.

In a report of Imperial College London overtaking Oxford in world university rankings, we said: “Imperial also significantly outguns Oxford and Cambridge on research citations per faculty.” Again, no need for “significantly”, especially as we gave the scores in the next sentence, so that the reader could judge for themselves how significant the difference is.

And we said the first satellite for spotting solar storms “will significantly boost our ability to forecast serious space weather events”. Again, no need.

Guy was being too sweeping, though, because sometimes we need to refer to statistical significance – that is, a change that is likely to be real rather than the product of random variation. And sometimes the word is used in the sense that Denis MacShane used it on Friday: “European politics will be divided, certainly on the left but much more significantly on the right.”

Nothing wrong with that. But we should always ask ourselves: Is your “significantly” really necessary?