Mea Culpa hits the buffers

Questions of style and language in last week’s ‘Independent’ reviewed by John Rentoul

Rishi Sunak was pilloried for having ‘derailed HS2’ (Getty/PA)

The HS2 story produced an outbreak of terrible train metaphors, in The Independent as much as in any other media outlet. We had one editorial headed “HS2 confusion could derail the Tory party conference”. A different editorial referred to a “rail crash” of an announcement. And we put the headline “End of the line” on an article about the decline in railway architecture, which included “those cavernous and catastrophically expensive HS2 portals bored into the Chilterns and Warwickshire countryside” as one of the things that is wrong with the current railway estate.

It is a shame we put such an uninteresting headline on such a good article, by Jonathan Glancey, the architectural critic. He showed how to use a familiar phrase in a new and pointed way. The article started by quoting the British Transport Police recorded announcement: “If you see something that doesn’t look right, speak to a member of staff or text the British Transport Police on 61016. See it. Say it. Sorted.”

Glancey went on: “Oh, the temptation. But, where to begin?” Very good. More of that kind of thing, please.

Braking is hard to do: In another article, we said that the prime minister not only “derailed” HS2, but “smashed the cross-party consensus on net zero, slammed the breaks on the ‘war on motorists’, and derailed HS2”. It is a common mistake: we meant “brakes”, as Paul Edwards wrote to point out.

It had not occurred to me before, but of course break and brake are different spellings of the same word. The meaning of a device used to slow a wheel dates from as recently as 1772, and comes from the word for a tool for breaking up the woody part of flax to loosen the fibres.

Ahead of the news: I haven’t complained about “upcoming” for several weeks, so it is time to return to the fray: “Businesses must prepare for the upcoming ban on some single-use plastic items, councils have warned,” we reported last weekend. If companies are being told to prepare for it, it obviously hasn’t happened yet, so we could simply have deleted the word. But if we ever need it, it is spelt “forthcoming”.

Bourne V: One of our Pictures of the Day on Tuesday was captioned: “Members of the Indian National Congress party hold banners under mosquito nets during a protest to condemn the failure to control vector bourne disease in Kolkata, India.” Thanks to Roger Thetford for drawing my attention to this unexpected addition to the Bourne film series.

We meant “vector-borne disease”, namely a disease that is transmitted to humans and other animals by a “vector”, or carrier – in this case by blood-feeding mosquitoes.

When I looked up vector-borne diseases I found myself in a maze of taxonomies, because they include Dengue fever, West Nile virus and Lyme disease as well as malaria. One of the definitions says that such diseases are transmitted by arthropods such as mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas. I thought those were all insects, but oh, no, that would be too simple. Ticks are arachnids, the class that includes spiders, so we have to use the phylum arthropod, which encompasses both insects and arachnids.

Fascinating as all this is, we didn’t really need to know any of it. We should have done without “vector-borne disease” altogether and just said “malaria”, because that is what the Indian National Congress members were demonstrating about.