Mea culpa: Don’t put the word ‘basis’ on a pedestal

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Extinction Rebellion... they’re all individuals! (AFP/Getty)

I became sensitised to the word “basis” this week. A harmless enough word, from the Greek for pedestal or base, but it does give rise to some reader-unfriendly constructions.

We wrote last week, for instance, about an insurance website that “claims to check the markets on a daily basis to ensure its prices remain competitive”. We could have said “check the markets daily” or “every day”.

Then we reported that, instead of pursuing a group action against the Metropolitan Police, Extinction Rebellion would “support people on an individual basis” if they sought compensation for false imprisonment. I think “support individuals” says the same thing more elegantly.

And in a report on how a four-day week – a policy that might be in Labour’s manifesto next week – has worked out in other countries, we said a New Zealand company had tried it out. Employees were 20 per cent more productive, so the company “said it would implement the shorter working week on a permanent basis”. Or, as we say in normal English, “permanently”.

Up and under: Double negatives are not untreacherous in most cases, and one of the commonest garbles is the formula “cannot be underestimated”, by which we usually mean the opposite. We used it to describe the significance of the Democrats winning control of the Virginia state legislature in the midterm election this month. We meant it was very important; that it “cannot be overestimated”.

No sympathy: We headlined an article analysing the main parties’ rival tax and spending plans in this election: “The devil’s in the detail on public spending pledges.” This is not only a terrible cliche, but it is uninformative. It tells us nothing about what we have found, except to say, with a figurative shrug, “It’s all a bit complicated, this.”

The article in fact concluded that there is little difference between Labour and Conservative spending plans but, because the Conservatives promise to cut taxes, their programme is less sustainable. We could have found a way of at least hinting at this finding, which will be surprising for many.

Blackened foot: We used “carbon footprint” a few times last week. I know it is hard to put the output of CO2 into the atmosphere into simple language that is easily understood, but I think this is not it. Why would you use the mark left by a foot in sand to refer to gases that contribute to global warming?