Errors & Omissions: An unfortunate case of ­daylight headline robbery

A headline spoiler, a technical misfire and a qualified absolute in this week's Independent

Steve Richards opened his Tuesday political comment piece, on George Osborne’s Budget speech, with a slow burn.

“Be prepared once again for another torrent of figures, growth projections, deficit forecasts and more proposed spending cuts. All these figures will connect very much with those spilling forth at previous Budgets … they will all be subject to immediate revision,” he wrote.

“There is only one reliable figure … that will determine economic policy for the next four years. That figure is 12 – the size of the Government’s overall majority.”

Good stuff, eh? A fine rhetorical flourish that points a moral. Pity about the headline immediately above: “The only figure that matters this week is the majority of 12.” That is called giving away the punchline, and is as much of a sin in a newspaper as in a comedy sketch. It means that sometimes we have to ditch the usual procedure and not write a headline that sums up the story’s main point.

µ “Areas hit by heavy rainfall boosted by £700m pledge” – a headline from Thursday’s Budget supplement. Rainfall is a figure: the rate at which rain has fallen in a given time at a given place, typically measured in millimetres per hour. The areas where £700m is to be spent on flood defences were not hit by a figure; they were hit by a lot of water falling from the sky – that is, by heavy rain. “Rainfall” sounds scientific, but to confuse it with rain is amateurish.

µ Here is another failure of technical knowledge, from a news story published on Thursday: “An Isis flag, a book on Salafism and a Kalashnikov submachine gun were found near the body of the Algerian gunman killed in Brussels.”

There are two common types of hand-held gun capable of fully automatic fire: submachine guns and assault rifles. The difference lies in the ammunition. A submachine gun fires a pistol-type round at close range. An assault rifle – the standard personal weapon of modern infantry soldiers – fires rifle ammunition, giving it much greater range and penetrating power.

The Kalashnikov is an assault rifle. (Cheap, reliable, manufactured in huge numbers in Russia and China and eagerly peddled by unscrupulous arms dealers, it is the bane of lawless Third World countries. But that problem is beyond the remit of a mere pedant.)

µ “The lead of Ms Clinton, in short, appears to be increasingly unassailable,” said a news story on the US elections on Thursday. “Increasingly unassailable” is odd. Surely “unassailable” is an absolute – can there be degrees of unassailability? And, even if there can, “increasingly” does not pair well with a negative. How about “is becoming unassailable”?

µ New research on inequality, said a news story on Monday, has added weight to “calls for George Osborne to delay higher-rate tax cuts and target spare cash towards families on lower incomes”. Really? Shouldn’t he rather be targeting the families with the cash, or aiming the cash towards the families?