Errors & Omissions: It’s so easy to fall foul of the law of unintended clichés

Unintended laws, confusing sentences and a mistaken biblical analogy from this week's Independent

David and Goliath, by Gustave Doré

Cliché of the week comes from an editorial published on Wednesday: “For while the Chancellor is right not to protect one of the many financial perks enjoyed by the relatively wealthy, Mr Osborne should beware of the law of unintended consequences.” Haven’t we heard enough about this “law”?

Scientific laws state striking truths about how the world behaves, and they are testable by experiment. Hooke’s Law, for instance, states that the deformation of an elastic body such as a spring is proportional to the force applied to it: pull it twice as hard and it will stretch twice as far. Useful to know that, if you’re designing a suspension bridge.

Even a parody of a scientific law should have that same aphoristic punch. I am thinking of Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. On that insight C Northcote Parkinson based a satiric account of the behaviour of bureaucracies that was enlightening as well as amusing.

What about the “law of unintended consequences”? For all its origins in a 1936 paper by the American sociologist Robert K Merton (thank you, Wikipedia), it seems to me to amount to little more than a bare assertion that people’s actions often have consequences that they don’t intend. Heavens, who’d have thought it?

That’s not a law, it’s a truism; and how would you devise an experiment to test it?

µ Here’s a sentence that needs to be cut in two. It comes from an obituary published on Thursday: “In 1985, he met Ann Getty, the wife of Gordon Getty, a reclusive composer, who had inherited one of the largest American fortunes from his oil tycoon father when they were taking a cure at a California health spa.”

The writer means to say this: “In 1985, he met Ann Getty when they were taking a cure at a California health spa. She was the wife of Gordon Getty, a reclusive composer who had inherited one of the largest American fortunes from his oil tycoon father.”

µ A Voices piece on Monday invoked a biblical analogy: “This is why Jeremy Corbyn deserves much respect. With his biblical beard and gaunt face, he is a David taking on not just one but an army of political and economic Goliaths.”

Almost, but not quite. The mature King David is depicted with a Corbyn-like beard, to be sure. But the David who slew the giant Goliath with a stone from his sling was a beardless boy.

µ Yes, I know that business and finance writers have to use many metaphors, since most of what they write about has no physical presence, but it can still make the reader smile. Here is a headline from Thursday’s paper: “Shell pushes ahead with $47bn BG deal despite tumbling oil”.

Surely, oil flows and oozes? It does not tumble. Or is tumbling oil a traditional unguent used by circus acrobats to assist their feats of tumbling, by lubricating their equipment or conditioning their skin?