Errors & Omissions: There’s a place for a criminal mastermind – in fiction

Professor Moriarty and Dr Fu Manchu are criminal masterminds. Abdelhamid Abaaoud was a terrorist planner. And other misfires in this week's Independent

For most of the week, our coverage of the Paris outrages resisted one of the most banal words in the journalese dictionary. But on Thursday we slipped up, with the headline “Police seeking proof terrorist mastermind was among the dead”.

It’s not just that “mastermind” has become hackneyed. The idea of a criminal mastermind has always been rooted in fiction, not fact. Professor Moriarty and Dr Fu Manchu are masterminds. The late Abdelhamid Abaaoud was, prosaically, a planner, but what did he do to justify the epithet “mastermind”? Using assault rifles to massacre unarmed people does not call for exceptional intellectual powers.

µ Never explain. This is from a news story last Saturday: “Fidler, clad in blue jeans and a crucifix pendant over abundant chest hair, could be mistaken for a forgotten member of hellraising rockers Status Quo.”

The decision to use Status Quo as an illustration of the personal appearance of Mr Fidler implies that the reader knows who Status Quo are and what they are like. Adding the explanation “hellraising rockers” just ruins the effect.

µ Another misfired illustration came in a feature article on Tuesday: “Modern-day poaching is a big, nasty business with links to organised crime. The days when poachers took one for the pot from the landed gentry, as epitomised by the bungling Claude Greengrass, the lovable rogue in television’s Heartbeat, are long gone.”

Now, not only have I never seen “television’s Heartbeat”, I had never heard of it until I read that sentence. But I was still able to appreciate what the writer meant by “the days when poachers took one for the pot from the landed gentry”. It’s not difficult. Writers should not treat the reader as an oaf to whom nothing is real unless it can be likened to something on the telly.

µ “It was up there among the most depressing 45 minutes of television I’ve ever watched.” So began a TV review published on Tuesday. That implies that the writer has a list of 45 depressing minutes, and this is one of them, which is not quite what was meant. How about “This was a candidate for the most depressing 45 minutes of television I have ever watched”?

µ Last Saturday we ran a piece about Grub Kitchen, a restaurant that serves dishes made from insects and other creepy-crawlies.

The introductory blurb said: “Britain’s first insect-only restaurant is open – so Rachael Pells decided to worm her way in.” Well, worms are not insects, in the strict scientific sense – and neither are tarantulas and millipedes, both of which were mentioned farther down the article.

It may be dogmatic to limit the noun “insect” to members of the class Insecta – six legs and a body divided into head, thorax and abdomen. Dictionaries certainly recognise a popular usage that includes spiders, woodlice and others. But that “insect-only” was an unnecessary invitation to pedantry.