Mea Culpa: The bigamous prime minister and the lightly poached lining of cloud

Glitches of language and style in last week’s Independent unglitched by John Rentoul

Harry and Meghan’s message ended up being rather overcooked (Archewell Foundation)

In an article about Meghan and Harry possibly moving to Portugal – I admit I had not been keeping up – we conjured up a world in which the British prime minister has two wives, one of them being David Lammy, and clouds come with side helpings. We reported: “Nowadays the UK is governed by Labour’s Keir Starmer, a man married to ‘first lady’ Victoria, who has a weakness for designer frocks, and a foreign secretary, David Lammy, with a track record of being considerably more vocal on Trump than even the Sussexes.”

The sentence was fixed by inserting a semicolon after “frocks”. Semicolons are out of favour these days, and rightly so, especially in “winking” emojis in text speak, but sometimes emergency needs must.

The article went on to say: “If increasingly frequent appearances from the Sussexes are a possible silver lining (for some) in the wake of Trump’s return to the White House, it should be served with a side of caution.” The mental image of lightly poached lining of cloud being served with green caution tossed in butter was so delightful we left it as it was.

Going on about ongoing: In our World News in Brief on Friday a headline read: “South Africa close Mozambique border amid ongoing violence.” First, South Africa is a country. All countries are singular since, around the time of the Civil War, the United States, which had previously been plural, ceased to be so. Then there is “amid”, which is not wrong as such, because we can imagine border guards struggling to shut the gates in the midst of a riot, but the point of the headline is cause and effect. Finally, there is “ongoing”. Obviously the violence is continuing, because if the violence had “ongone”, the border would probably have opened again. As for the other five words of the headline: nothing wrong with them. What we meant was: “South Africa closes Mozambique border after protests turn violent.”

Double back: In an article about a woman who had survived domestic abuse, an ambiguous turn of words risked distracting the reader. Every time her partner left, we said, “Sweeney inevitably returned. After attacking Delia again at her flat, a friend of hers called the police after feeling something was wrong after Delia didn’t turn up at the pub.” The reader can quickly work out that it was Sweeney who attacked her again, not the friend, but we should not make the reader “work” at all.

Building a lean-to: In an article about Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of NHS England, supporting our appeal to build refuges for women fleeing domestic abuse, we said she “made her intervention as she leant her support to The Independent’s Brick by Brick campaign”. We changed that to “lent” after a reader pointed it out. She wasn’t leaning; in a sense, we are leaning on her for support. She was lending her support to us, which is a polite way of putting it, because we hope that she won’t want it back.