Mea Culpa: Palpable relief achieved by digging deep

Clichés, contradictions and concerning questions in this week’s Independent

Brian O’Nolan, 1911-1966, who wrote under the names Flann O’Brien and Myles na Gopaleen

The word “palpable” reminds me of Myles na Gopaleen’s Catechism of Cliché, written by Flann O’Brien (above). “What is a bad thing worse than? Useless. What can one do with fierce resistance? Offer it. But if one puts fierce resistance, in what direction does one put it? Up.”

What, then, was Shane Long’s relief at scoring his first Premier League goal in 324 days? We reported that it was palpable.

We also wrote about the response of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which runs the Oscars, to the Weinstein scandal – a code of conduct, apparently. We were worried that this was not enough: “There’s a palpable feeling this could be the limit of their actions.” Given that palpable means feel-able, this wasn’t the best choice of words.

Congratulations, then, to Jonathan Liew, for using “palpable” in a sports report without it being attached to its usual partner: “Bayliss’s irritation at having to deal with the distraction of another Australian media-confected controversy was palpable.” Irritation? I almost felt a palpable sense of relief.

High or low? We had this headline in the Daily Edition last week: “FTSE 100 digs deep to close 2017 at a record high.” Thanks to Henry Peacock for pointing out this metaphor that has gone awry: “They say that digging a hole is the only job where you start at the top and work your way down.”

Digging deep is a common enough phrase in sports reporting, as athletes are imagined to be excavating the depths of their soul or whatever it is that makes them perform well. But the Financial Times Stock Exchange index is not a sentient being that is straining towards a score closer to 8,000.

And down is not up.

Rising intonation: Some sentences look like questions, and we sometimes put question marks at the end of them by mistake. This week we added a question mark to this statement in a letter to the editor from Julian Self: “I wonder whether I can be the only person who fondly envisages the streamlining of our Government by means of such cutting-edge tools.”

Sorry about that. We have deleted it now. But the word “whether” does seem to trip us up. Recently we commented on the special election in Alabama: “We want to know whether it is really possible for a state that calls itself not just conservative, but conservative in the evangelical tradition, to vote for a man like Moore.” Again, we deleted a superfluous question mark.

Perhaps it would help if we wrote “if” instead of “whether”, which is also shorter. I don’t know whether, or if, it matters. You would know what I meant if I wrote: “I don’t know whether it matters?” But it might sound Australian if read aloud and less clutter is probably better.

Concerning ambiguity: Call me a fuddy duddy but I don’t see what is wrong with the word “worrying”. The current fashion for “concerning” often produces ambiguity that forces the reader to pause, however briefly, to check the meaning. On our sports pages this week, for example, we wrote: “Kevin De Bruyne and Gabriel Jesus went off in anguish with what looked like concerning injuries.” It took me only a micro-second to be sure that “concerning” did not mean “about”, but it is worrying that it is a micro-second that I will never get back.