Mea Culpa: In an alternative universe, this column wouldn’t have happened

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

An article comparing David Davis’s trip to Washington to 'The Twilight Zone' prompted a complaint (Getty)

I was once told off for using the Americanism “alternate reality” rather than the British “alternative reality”, so I leap instinctively to the defence of my good colleague Matthew Norman, who is accused of the same offence.

Paul Edwards writes to object to this sentence in an article comparing David Davis’s trip to Washington to The Twilight Zone: “An episode of the original alternate reality series was titled ‘Five Characters In Search Of An Exit’.”

As readers of this column may know, I have been reading Kingsley Amis’s The King’s English recently, and he says this: “There is no excuse but the grossest similarity in appearance to confuse these two. Alternately means ‘first one, then the other, then the one, then the other, and so on’; alternatively means ‘another possibility is that …’ Similarly with the adjectives alternate and alternative.”

That would seem to be us told. But Amis then goes on to declare: “Exception: An Americanism that sound anomalous to British ears, as Americanisms will, is contained in the phrase ‘alternate world’ and its derivatives. This refers to a kind of science-fiction story or idea whereby some great crisis of the past went the other way and correspondingly changed history since that point.”

Despite his reputation as a curmudgeon, Amis could be indulgent when he wanted to be: “British readers are advised to follow this trend in the science-fiction context and nowhere else.”

I am not sure I agree with him. I don’t think it matters, but as long as some people do think it does there is no need to put them off. If, in an alternative universe, Norman had written “alternative reality” no one would have batted an eyelid and none of this would have happened.

Prize paragraph: Occasionally this column hands out plaudits as well as brickbats, so I should note that Paul Edwards, despite taking issue with “alternate reality”, praised the quality of Matthew Norman’s writing generally and – justly – singled out his final paragraph about the former Brexit secretary’s travels: “No one knows ... anything at all, beyond the fact that Grandpa Davis went to Washington, where one assumes, without knowing, that his highest level of contact was one of those grizzled bartenders who nod sympathetically at the ravings of deluded nebbishes on behalf of his tip jar.”

Mystery of existence: I have written before about the fashion for “existential”, referring either to a work of art about the mystery of existence or to a threat to the very existence of something. This week we quoted a group called Extinction Rebellion, which called climate change “our existential crisis”, which is all right I suppose.

But we also started a football report thus: “Even if only barely existential in comparison to the cauldron in Kazan … England’s rematch with Croatia was always about so much more than securing a summer siesta in the Algarve.” Given that the England football team either exists or does not, it is hard to see how a match could be “barely” existential.

Listen up: To return to Extinction Rebellion, the environmental group, we reported that it had declared a “Rebellion Day” and “invited the nation to join them outside a tone-deaf parliament”. As John Schluter wrote to point out, we probably meant a “stone-deaf parliament”, meaning one that is not listening, rather than one that cannot hold a tune.