Mea Culpa: Misfired metaphor sparks journalese confusion

Matters of style and usage in this week’s Independent

California wildfire, sparked by, er, sparks (AP)

“It needs a spark and it needs a leader.” That is what a Labour MP said to me about the prospect of an alternative to Jeremy Corbyn’s politics in the party. The metaphor of a tiny fiery particle that starts a blaze is vivid and easy to understand, so no wonder we journalists use it all the time.

In journalese, however, it is always a verb. “Sparks” is more exciting than “causes”, even if it is never used that way in normal speech. And we use it so often that we sometimes forget the original metaphor and end up painting some curious mental pictures.

A recent “news in brief” item was headlined: “Pilots fired after vaping sparks mid-air emergency.” Apparently one of them “lit” an e-cigarette in the cockpit and then managed to turn off the air-conditioning in the rest of the plane, causing the emergency oxygen masks to drop. But vapes don’t spark: they use battery power to heat a liquid.

We got into more of a tangle with a couple of weather-related stories. In one article we said: “The northern hemisphere is experiencing a record-breaking summer, with extreme temperatures sparking wildfires.”

At least that metaphor is working in the right direction: heat, spark, fire. On the sports pages the other day we had a clash of opposites. We reported that Lewis Hamilton “took the chequered flag at Hockenheim following a dramatic conclusion sparked by a rain shower, and Vettel’s jaw-dropping crash”. Perhaps it was one of those thunderstorms that we’ve been looking forward to for days: sparks of lightning and showers of rain at the same time. No wonder Sebastian Vettel crashed.

Let my patient go: In our report of the recovery of Charlie Rowley, the novichok victim, we said he “was released from hospital on Friday”. Richard Hanson-James wrote to ask why we used “released” rather than “discharged”. He makes a good point. There is a suggestion of imprisonment about “release”, whereas “discharge” has long been associated with doctors giving a patient the all-clear. A small but important distinction.

Ambiguous Trump: The tendency to leave words out of headlines can cause confusion. This week we published this: “Report: Trump secretly recorded discussing payments to Playboy model.” Alessandro Fontana wrote to say he did a double take: it read as if Trump had recorded himself. He asked: “Why not insert ‘was’ after ‘Trump’?” In the old days, we might have said that we did not have space. In the new digital-only world, we have no such excuse.