Mea Culpa: Cheque which meaning of check we mean

Americanisms with double meanings and other clichés and glitches in The Independent this week

I am grateful to John Schluter for drawing my attention to the last line of our report on Tuesday about Barack Obama’s $6 dinner in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, the chef (above). “Bourdain tweeted that he picked up the cheque.”

Delightful: the American word “check” has two financial meanings that it doesn’t have in British English. It means either a cheque or a restaurant bill. We left it as “check” on the website, which was fine as the report was taken from the Washington Post, but “corrected” it on the app to the wrong British word.

No time soon: My attempt to stamp out the infection of “any time soon” has not succeeded yet. Four uses this week, according to the digital database, but one of them was particularly horrible. We reported on Wednesday: “Domestic cats across New York may soon be able to rest easy that no one will be attempting to remove their claws any time soon because to do so will be punishable by law.”

That is two “soons” in one sentence, the second one the corrupt and space-wasting version. Normally you can just cross out “any time”. Here we should have struck out the whole phrase. Not only would a cliché have been removed but the sentence would have made sense.

Legal milestone: We reported on Wednesday on Sir Ian McKellen’s campaign against India’s anti-gay laws, and said: “Although a Delhi High Court order decriminalised homosexual acts in 2009, four years later in 2013, the Supreme Court reversed the landmark ruling and reinstated the colonial-era law.”

There is nothing wrong with describing historic events as landmarks, except that it is a bit hackneyed and therefore leads to awkward constructions such as this. The Delhi High Court erected a tower that could be seen for miles, and the Supreme Court came along and reversed it. Does that mean it towed it away in the opposite direction, or that it dug a hole just as deep instead?

System failure: On Thursday we carried a headline on a report from New York, “Domino’s Pizza sued for systemically underpaying employees.” We meant “systematically”, as we said in the story itself.

“Systemic” means to do with a whole system rather than a part of it, while “systematic” means methodical – done according to a plan or system. Neither is a word we should use if we can help it, and certainly not in a headline. “Deliberately” or “consistently” might have been better.