Mea Culpa: who does ‘her’ think she is?

John Rentoul rounds up some of the infelicities of expression in this week’s Independent

We added to the education secretary’s difficulties with a grammatical slip (PA)

In the editorial on Wednesday about the education secretary’s difficulties, we speculated that “Ms Keegan had forgotten which party has been in charge of education for the past 13 years … and indeed that it was her who ordered 150 schools to be closed or partially closed just before or, in the worst cases, after term started.” Who was it who ordered the schools to be closed or partially closed? She did. Not “her” did. So that should say “it was she who ordered…”

Thanks to Sue Alexander who pointed it out. That it came in the middle of a 62-word sentence may not have helped the writer keep track of the grammar.

In the same editorial, we commented: “There seems to be a quite widespread feeling in Britain that ‘nothing works anymore’.” As Ms Alexander also pointed out, “any more” is two words. The Americans increasingly squish them together, but in my mind and in British English, they are two distinct ideas and two distinct words.

A bit of a jolt: We nearly reported on Tuesday on the effects of “a shocking 61,000 lightning strikes across India’s eastern state of Odisha in two hours”, which would have been almost witty for the literalism of “shocking”, except that 12 people died and we decided that levity – even if unintended – was inappropriate. No adjective was needed: we supply the facts and the reader decides how they feel about them.

Wrong way round: Our headline, “French teenager dies after police car hits scooter”, gave a rather different impression of events from the news story under it. The report said the scooter collided with the side of a police vehicle. As John Harrison pointed out, unless the car was sliding sideways, that suggests that the scooter hit the car. The article mentioned two police cars so it is possible that one caused the collision with the other, but it did not say so, so the headline should have said “...scooter hits police car”.

Fenced in: In Pictures of the Day on Friday, we described some freshwater mussels as being “reared in captivity”. Mick O’Hare said the phrase seemed wrong to him, implying an animal whose movement is constrained; mussels don’t usually move far anyway. I think “farmed” is probably the word we wanted.

Sticks in the crore: In an article about the suggestion that Narendra Modi might seek to change the international name of India to Bharat, we quoted Shashi Tharoor, the opposition Congress party leader: “The country belongs to 140 crore [10 million] people, not to a party.” The conversion in square brackets was quite wrong, as Richard Thomas wrote to point out.

Which should have been obvious from the context, because Tharoor is talking about the entire population of India. The Indian counting system of lakhs and crores may seem quaint to British eyes, but it is decimal: a lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 100 lakh, or 10m. It would seem that someone has looked up “crore” and put the figure for one crore, without doing the multiplication: the population of India is about 1.4bn.

Not a child: The curse of the “On This Day” feature struck again on Tuesday. It said that on that day in 1963, “Christine Keeler, one of the girls at the centre of the Profumo scandal, was arrested and charged with perjury”. Girls? As Nigel Fox wrote to remind us, she was 21, so she was an adult even by the law of the time (the age of majority was reduced to 18 in 1970). I assume that the word is an echo of the phrase “call girl”, which is how Keeler was sometimes described, but that is hardly an excuse. We can only apologise.