Errors & Omissions: Case of mistaken identity – one wet torso is not like another
Who he? Ethical morals and editorialising in headlines from this week's Independent
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Your support makes all the difference.Last Saturday we ran a profile of Andrew Davies, who wrote the acclaimed BBC television version of War and Peace. It recalled “the extreme media commotion when Colin Firth’s brooding, saturnine Mr Darcy took off his shirt in the much-cherished Davies-scripted 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice”.
No, Firth’s shirt stayed on; it was just wet from a swim (above). The bare torso that set feminine hearts aflutter across the nation was that of another actor, Aidan Turner, in a more recent television costume drama, Poldark.
µ One of those “Who he?” moments occurred in a business comment piece last Saturday: “Mr Livingstone has long been an ambassador for digital – when he was Business Secretary, Vince Cable made him creative industries champion.”
When a pronoun such as “he”, or “she” or “they” appears, the reader assumes it refers to the last person mentioned, in this case Livingstone. When it turns out to be someone else, such as Cable, the reader does a double-take. It is a good principle always to name a person before, not after, referring to them by a pronoun. In this case, writing “when Vince Cable was Business Secretary, he made him creative industries champion” would have put everything right.
µ An editorial on Tuesday pronounced: “Tax avoidance may not, by the letter of the law, be a crime – but it is morally and ethically wrong.”
“Morally and ethically” sounds grander than just plain “morally” or “ethically”, but is there really any difference? Is there a Jesuit in the house?
µ “Beaming with pride, smug fugitive Assange hails UN ‘vindication’.” This headline appeared on a news page last Saturday, but the word “smug” doesn’t appear in the story at all. That the word “smug” fits Julian Assange perfectly is not an opinion I would argue with, but opinions should not pop up in the middle of news headlines.
µ “At least 10 people have been killed and more than 80 injured after two passenger trains collided head-on at high speed in isolated countryside in southern Bavaria.”
That was the opening of a news story published on Wednesday. “Isolated” is derived, by way of French, Italian and late Latin, from the Latin word insula, which means “island”. So “isolated” means like an island – and hence cut off or alone. It implies cut off by some kind of barrier, such as the sea surrounding an island. That is not quite the right picture for a stretch of countryside. “Remote” would have been better.
µ “Neither of the New Hampshire winners are immune to reversals of fortune,” said a report on the US elections on Thursday. Consistent number agreement between subject and verb seems to be getting less and less likely. I have seen “none are” often enough before, but “neither are” is a new one. Surely it must be “neither is”.
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