Mea Culpa: the no longer decadent Nigella Lawson

The use and abuse of language in last week’s Independent, as adjudicated by John Rentoul

‘And let me tell you another thing about vaccines, Brexit and foreigners...’ (Getty)

We had this headline on our front page on Tuesday: “Nigella Lawson says she rarely hosts decadent dinner parties anymore.” We should have put “decadent” in quotation marks. We did not mean that Lawson often hosts austere and morally upright dinner parties; we meant that she rarely hosts any dinner parties these days, because she thinks they are “decadent”.

Also, and this is a mere stylistic preference, I would have “any more” as two words.

Cycle of hate: In an opinion article railing against Elon Musk’s decision to allow Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson back on Twitter, we asked: “What do Hopkins and Robinson contribute other than pedalling misinformation framed as ‘truth’?” That was changed to “peddling”.

This is a word that is nearly obsolete in its original meaning of “selling”, and survives mainly in its figurative sense. It is often misspelt as the more familiar word that sounds the same, even though the metaphor of Hopkins and Robinson cycling around town distributing misinformation doesn’t quite make sense.

One, two, buckle my what? In a report listing the proposals in Rishi Sunak’s King’s Speech we said: “As the UK’s prisons buckle at the seams…” Normally things burst at the seams or buckle under pressure. Thanks to Gavin Turner for pointing this out, and adding a substantive comment, that “there is a great deal more wrong about the UK prison system than mere overcrowding”.

I was surprised, when I searched for it, to find that the phrase has been used a few times before. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said the NHS was “buckling at the seams” in January. It was also used, again about the NHS, in a Mail on Sunday editorial a decade ago.

More recently, a film review in The Sunday Times mentioned how “the universe buckles at the seams” in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, the seventh in the series. But it is possible, I suppose, that the universe behaves a bit differently from pieces of cloth, and that “seams” refer to interdimensional portals, vortices and other types of implausible physics.

Stream of cliches: In “Home news in brief”, on Monday, we reported on the loss of water supply in Surrey with a veritable torrent of abstractions. “A major incident has been declared,” we said, because of “ongoing problems” at a Thames Water treatment works “after Storm Ciaran caused issues”. As Henry Peacock wrote to say, that is an “incident”, even a “major” one, an “ongoing” and an “issues” in just one paragraph. “Nowhere did we learn how Storm Ciaran caused the problem of cloudiness,” he pointed out. Still, we did learn a new verb: “Thames Water is tankering water.” Life is an education.

Long service: In our report of the death of David Hilditch, a former member of Northern Ireland’s legislative assembly, we said: “He was one of only three MLAs who had served continually from 1998 until 2023.” We meant “continuously” – “continually” is usually used to mean an action that is repeated for a long time.

No sale: We referred on Wednesday to a “poppy seller” who “claimed he was punched at a rail station during a pro-Palestine rally in Edinburgh”. That is a “railway station”, by the way, but the report prompted Lloyd Bracey to remind us of what he learned “a long time ago from an old stickler”, that there are no poppy sellers: “Poppies are given in return for a donation, amount unspecified; they’re a mark of remembrance, not commercial gain.”

Which is a good point, but what, then, should we call them, so that we can be ready for next year? Poppy distributors? Poppy volunteers? Lloyd suggested poppy givers or poppy keepers. If anyone has any other ideas, let us know.