Mea Culpa: how to reduce the damage done by Donald Trump and Brexit

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

Trump speaks while meeting Ireland’s PM Leo Varadkar in the White House (Reuters)

We reported yesterday that Donald Trump had come out against The Independent’s Final Say campaign – he said another referendum “would be very unfair to the people that won”.

The report also mentioned the prospect of a US-UK trade deal and said that some commentators were “suggesting it would mitigate against the substantial economic damage” of Brexit.

Thanks to Bernard Theobald for pointing it out. Mitigate is one of a pair of words – the other is militate – which can be confused. Mitigate is the correct word here, meaning “alleviate” or “reduce”, but the “against” has been borrowed from militate. So the sentence has been changed to say the deal would “mitigate the substantial economic damage”.

Militate is a bit of a fossil. It is only ever used with “against”, when it means “work against”. It comes from Latin militat-, to do with serving as a soldier. I don’t think it is needed and getting rid of it would liberate mitigate to be used without people worrying if it is the right word.

Most of the time we could simply use “reduce” rather than mitigate, but it does have its own connotations that are worth preserving. It comes from Latin mitigare, to make mild, and implies active efforts to make something bad less severe, serious, or painful.

Min headroom: My authority as a kind of Academie Anglaise over the English language does not extend to the Treasury, so I could not order Philip Hammond, the chancellor, to desist from using the word “headroom” in his spring statement this week. But I can at least mutter under my breath when our writers use it and they are not quoting him.

We used it a couple of times in our coverage of the Spring Statement. Its use in normal English refers to a low ceiling or to the number of inches between the top of a driver’s head and a car roof. The Treasury uses it to mean an amount of money it thinks the chancellor can spend while keeping to a number of rules that it has usually made up to arrive at the answer the politicians first thought of.

We said that changes to the way student loans are recorded could “absorb almost half of the chancellor’s headroom”. Well, you can’t absorb space. We could have said something like “use almost half of the money the chancellor has available”.

Work of art: One of the joys of online journalism is that the space constraints of print are eased. If you need a longer headline, our template is flexible enough to allow it. But brevity is still a virtue, especially on our front pages, where some of our headlines are limited to about 70 characters, or about half an old tweet.

So all credit to whoever came up with this gem yesterday: “Thieves steal fake €3m masterpiece after police swap painting with copy.” A wonder of compression, telling the whole terrific story in just 11 words.