Mea culpa: ‘By land, by sea, by dirigible’

John Rentoul reviews matters of style and language in last week’s Independent

A balloon believed to have been sent by North Korea to South Korea, carrying various objects including what appeared to be excrement (Yonhap via Reuters)

In our report of the odd story about North Korean balloons sent over South Korea to drop manure and rubbish, we called them “dirigibles”. This is not what they were. Dirigible is an adjective meaning “capable of being steered”, literally directable, and a noun, which is short for dirigible balloon or airship.

No doubt, in our ceaseless search for alternative words to avoid repetition, we alighted on something that sounded impressive. Thanks to Andy Millard, who added the important point that The Decemberists, one of his (and my) favourite bands, managed to use the word “dirigible” in their song “Sons and Daughters”:

“We will arise from the bunkers/ By land, by sea, by dirigible/ We’ll leave our tracks untraceable now.”

Mr and Ms: In an article about the prime minister’s wife taking to the election campaign trail, we referred to her as “Mrs Murty”. John Harrison thought we should use “Mrs” only when someone takes her husband’s surname. In fact, our style is always to use “Ms”, which short-circuits such reasoning. Except for people from history, such as “Mrs Thatcher”, when that is how they are best known.

Maths lesson 1: A report of a wooden satellite made by a team from Kyoto University described it as “the 10-cubic centimetre LignoSat probe”. This was contradicted by the photo, and its caption which said: “LignoSat’s wooden satellite measures 10x10x10cm.”

That is 1,000 cubic centimetres. We meant that it was a 10-centimetre cube.

Maths lesson 2: My campaign against spurious precision continues. Our report of the fire in Kharkiv caused by Russian airstrikes said it “raged over an area of 13,000 square metres (15,548 square yards), interior minister Ihor Klymenko said”. As his estimate was obviously an approximate figure, it is pointless and distracting to convert it to the nearest single square yard, as Roger Thetford pointed out. Indeed, as a square metre is roughly the same as a square yard, it did not need to be converted at all.

Maths lesson 3: Another of my continuing campaigns is against the use of the word “multiple” to mean “several”. I admit that this is just a stylistic preference, but on Thursday we strayed into actual confusion with a sub-headline on our sports pages: “Multiple grand slam winners put on a show at French Open.”

We referred to only two grand slam winners, Iga Swiatek and Naomi Osaka, in the article, which reported their match against each other. At the end of the report, we listed six other matches and gave their results, but we didn’t say if any of the players were grand slam winners. I was puzzled by the use of “multiple” to mean “two”, which is roughly the number of players you would expect in a singles tennis match.

At which point, I realised that by “multiple” we meant that Swiatek and Osaka had each won several grand slams. It would have been much easier to understand if we had simply deleted the word.

Horsey-horsey: In “Sports news in brief” on Monday, we mentioned an “equestrian horse rider”. As “equestrian” means “to do with horse riding”, this was one word too many, as Philip Nalpanis pointed out.

Got the T-shirt: In our report of a breakthrough in solar power that could make most household batteries obsolete, we said of the company’s co-founder: “The t-shirt he wears describes his company’s technology as ‘world-changing’.”

I think that should be “T-shirt” because it means a shirt in the shape of a capital T.