Mea Culpa: living, breathing and experiencing

John Rentoul reviews questions of usage and style in last week’s Independent

Ed Sheeran can call his albums anything he likes, but misplaced use of division and multiplication in these pages is frowned upon (PA Wire)

We used the phrase “lived experience” a couple of times in the past week. We said that shoplifters “have their own lived experience”, which “tells them that the chance of being nicked is vanishingly small”; and that someone “spoke from a position of lived experience”.

I suppose this is an attempt to emphasise that a person has been through something themselves, and that they are not making assumptions about what others might feel. I don’t think it works. Experience is by definition personal, and “lived” adds nothing, except possibly to irritate the reader. As the Cybermen say: “Delete. Delete. Delete.”

Multiply and divide: We used the word “multiple” 22 times in the past seven days, a computer search tells me. In every case we could have said “several” and in a couple of cases we could have deleted it altogether. In a recapitulation of the Yom Kippur war, for example, we said “multiple assaults came from Arab states led by Egypt and Syria”. The use of the plural should have been enough to tell the reader that there was more than one assault. Delete again.

I admit the difference between “multiple” and “several” is merely a stylistic preference on my part, but on Thursday, and still in Israel-Palestine, we reported: “Hundreds of thousands of IDF troops have amassed in multiple divisions on the border of the enclave.” This is a mess. Apart from the distracting echo of multiplication and division, the unspecified number of divisions adds nothing to the “hundreds of thousands” of troops. Then there is “amassing”, which is a transitive verb, that is, something that is done by a subject to an object, as in “amassing a fortune”. We meant “massing”, an intransitive verb, meaning something that a subject – in this case, the Israel Defence Forces – just does.

So we should have said: “Hundreds of thousands of IDF troops have massed on the border of the enclave.” Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for putting us straight.

Ding dong: In an article about the joys of dining with one’s spouse, Mick O’Hare, a reader, came across the sentence, “Wringing the changes is generally a good thing to do.” Thanks to him for alerting the authorities. I have looked it up and still don’t understand what “ringing the changes” meant originally, but it is definitely to do with church bells and not clothes-wringers.

Biden bored: I realise that the difference between “disinterested” and “uninterested”, which was always artificial and pedantic, is being worn down. But while it retains the ability to distract the reader, we should be aware of it. Writing about Joe Biden’s response to the Hamas attack on Israelis, we said: “Anyone paying attention over the last two years will have witnessed an administration that was at best detached from, and at worst disinterested in, addressing the roots of the conflict.”

Thanks to Paul Edwards for pointing out that, for many readers, “disinterested” means impartial, as in having no interest in either side of a dispute, which has never been the US approach to Israel-Palestine. We meant “uninterested” in the sense of President Biden being preoccupied with other matters.

Numeracy: On Wednesday we had a headline that read: “Why the amount of girls who drop maths doesn’t add up.” A girl is a countable noun, so that should have been “the number of girls”, but we changed it anyway to: “Why maths for girls still doesn’t add up.” Much better.

Incredible journey: Finally in our coverage of the bed bug panic sweeping London, we wrote: “Another woman films herself stamping on a suspected bed bug after spotting it waiting on the platform at Kennington.” As charming as the image might be of an insect waiting patiently for an Underground train, we should probably have had a “while” after “spotting it”.