Mea Culpa: the hidden treasures of French rioters

Breaches of convention of style and language in last week’s Independent, observed by John Rentoul

Protesters block a street with rubbish in Colombes, outside Paris (AP)

I feel quite nostalgic about this confusion, which I haven’t seen for some time. In our coverage of the rioting in France, we reported the reprehensible views of the country’s police unions, which put out a statement saying their members were “at war” with “savage hoards of vermin”.

We changed it to “hordes”, which is what the unions meant: uncivilised crowds. It comes from Turkish ordu, camp or army, which came to mean a warrior tribe of nomads living in tents. The Oxford dictionary says the initial H seems to have been acquired in Polish. Nothing to do with “hoard”, a Germanic word meaning treasure, and especially hidden treasure. And we cannot blame the translation because the French for horde is horde.

And what next? John Harrison reports that he had to read this headline twice: “Currys reports sales and profits dip.” Such is the human instinct for storytelling that the simple word “and” does more than add two things together. It often means “and then”, as one thing leads to another, so we seemed to be saying that reporting sales caused the profits to dip. What we should have said was: “Currys reports dip in sales and profits.”