Mea Culpa: The Japanese knotweed of weather reporting

We made a mess of saying ‘It’s cold’ in The Independent last week, according to John Rentoul

Walkers in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh on Saturday (Andrew Milligan/PA)

A front page headline on Thursday briefly read: “Snow warnings as NHS board says to avoid going outside in morning or night amid icy conditions.” Apart from the blatant attempt to ignore my campaign against “amid”, this has the phrase “says to”, which is fine as conversational English but a news headline needs a more formal register, such as “NHS board advises against going outside...” Finally there are the “conditions”, the Japanese knotweed of weather reporting. There is always a better and more specific way of conveying the necessary information.

In one report we said that “rain turning to snow is likely to lead to some travel disruption and difficult driving conditions”, when we could have said “and make driving difficult”. In another we said, “Yvette Cooper is claiming to have broken the link between favourable weather conditions and surges in migrant crossings,” when we could have simply deleted “conditions”.

Hard water: Before Christmas we managed to avoid the term “icy conditions” in a picture caption, but still managed to mangle the sense, saying: “The Loch Insh Dippers take part in a Christmas-themed swim in the frozen lake in the Cairngorms National Park, Scotland.” As John Harrison pointed out, if the lake were frozen it would be impossible to swim in it. Perhaps we meant “freezing lake”, a term that can be interpreted metaphorically as well as literally.

Go without the extra letter: Last weekend, in an interview with Andrew Garfield about his film We Live in Time, about caring for someone with cancer, we said that one of the characters makes a suggestion: “that foregoing surgery and chemo for six great months together might feel better.” The convention is that the word is spelt “forgoing” when it means “going without”, and that the version with an “e” means “going before”. It doesn’t matter much, as the meaning was clear in this case, but we might as well show off our pedantic knowledge.

Take an imperial inch: Talking of which, Iain Brodie apologised for drawing my attention to the use of the phrase “metric tonnes” on Friday. What next, he asked, “imperial inches”? He added: “I really am sorry for being so pedantic about such a trivial detail.” Not at all, Mr Brodie, not at all.

Pedantry is another word for attention to detail, which is the impression that a reliable news source wants to give. We know, after all, that “tonne” is the spelling of the metric version, and that it is only the word “ton” that might need to be qualified: a US ton is 907kg, whereas a British ton is 1,016kg. The important point about a tonne, 1,000kg, is that it is not significantly different from a British ton.

Singular nature: In our editorial on New Year’s Eve paying tribute to Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, we said: “The particular nature of his modest beginnings, as a peanut farmer and southerner, were electoral liabilities in some Washington circles.” This is a common error, by which the writer starts with a singular subject (“the particular nature”) but mentions a plural (“beginnings”) and a two-part list (“peanut farmer and southerner”) and arrives at the end of the sentence with a plural verb (“were electoral liabilities”). Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for reminding us that “the particular nature ... was an electoral liability”.