Mea Culpa: never mind the ‘breaking silence’, what did she say?

John Rentoul on questions of usage, style and spelling in last week’s Independent

Holly Willoughby had to avoid commenting during her would-be kidnapper’s trial (Getty)

On Thursday, we reported: “Holly Willoughby breaks silence after security guard found guilty of kidnap plot.” This is a common journalistic device deployed when a celebrity who has been under pressure to say something finally does so, but in this case Willoughby issued a statement at the end of the trial of someone accused of seeking to kidnap her. It would have been wrong for her to comment while the trial was taking place, except as a witness in court, and she commented as soon as the verdict was announced, so the implication that she had been “silent” before was unfair.

Even if “breaks silence” is just a way of saying that someone has said something after not doing so for a while, I think it is usually better to put what they said in the headline. In this case, that she will be “forever grateful” to a US undercover police officer who foiled the plot.

Not neonatal: On Monday, we reported that Robert Hayward, the Conservative peer and elections analyst, had said that the opinion polls were “not born out” in the local elections, in which the Tories outperformed them. This was changed to “borne”, according to the strange convention of spelling that reserves the e-less version of the word to the sense of giving birth. It is the same word, the past of “bear”, meaning “carry”. The phrase “borne out” means something that is carried or supported by the evidence, rather than anything to do with birth.

Taste for freedom: “Runaway military horses bolt through London again,” we said in a headline on Monday, which wrongly suggested that the horses that had bolted before had done it again. Perhaps they had gained a taste for that kind of thing, despite the injuries they suffered last time, John Harrison speculated.

Except that when he read to the end of the article, it said that they were different horses. I think the “again” is the problem. “More runaway military horses bolt through London” would have been fine.

The bear-yak-pug: I had never noticed people writing “a lot” as one word before, but it came up twice in a report of mobile phones being stolen in Britain and ending up in China. There was “not alot” the British police could do when the phones reach China, we quoted a police officer as saying. There wasn’t much that they could do before the phone left the country either, the officer said, referring to the problem of people tracking their phone on “Find My iPhone” and demanding that the police smash the door down and get the phone back. “There’s alot more to it than that,” we said.

A colleague drew my attention to a blogger who has written about this new word, saying that they imagine an alot to be a creature that looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug. This makes spotting examples of it more fun.

Death to difference: We used “different to” three times last week. This is pure stylistic preference, and indeed snobbery, but my preferred form is “different from”. There is no good reason for it, but my argument, as always, is that if we use the traditional, more formal style, it makes us seem more authoritative to those readers who notice it. As long as there is a significant segment of the readership who do notice it, it is worth trying to impress them.

Cliche Watch: On Thursday, we said in a headline: “Fearnley loses four-set thriller to Djokovic.” I thought that there were only five-set thrillers in men’s tennis and three-set thrillers in women’s, but cliches are meant to be adapted. In this case, though, I think the cliche is diluted, rather than refreshed.