Mea Culpa: A vast chasm opens up in the British transport network

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Scenes from Liverpool Street station show commuters bearing up under the (less than) chaotic disruption (PA)

Thanks to James Shepherd for minding the shop in my absence. He wrote to the letters page last week to reprove us gently for an outbreak of “travel chaos”. Some of this vast chasm (a word from the same Greek root) in our transport networks was still gaping last weekend, when we carried the headline: “Storms leave passengers stranded amid travel chaos.”

Bonus points are awarded for the use of the journalese “amid”, and the effect of the whole is to conjure a vision of dust-covered refugees sitting on their luggage on the remains of a station platform, surrounded by ruined buildings, upturned vehicles and fallen power cables.

The day before we had the headline: “Almost a million without electricity as National Grid failure causes travel chaos.” Again, I understand that a lot of people were inconvenienced when their trains stopped, but the overuse of the word “chaos”, especially in its familiar form, “travel chaos”, has the paradoxical effect of diminishing the severity of the disruption.

Some of the factual description of what happened from the report itself could have had more dramatic effect if it had been promoted to the headline, such as: “Commuters were left using their phones as torches to find their way out of underground stations and airports”.

Ban flouted: I thought I had resolved the ancient dispute in the College of Pedantry about the word “decimate” some years ago. My ruling was simple, which was that it should never be used. Sadly, this solemn and binding law is not always enforced.

Philip Nalpanis wrote to point out that an editorial last week included this sentence: “The latest figures off industry body the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders show investment has been literally decimated – 90 per cent down on the long term average.”

To start with, the word “off” is informal for a leading article. “From” would be better. Next, our style is usually to name an organisation and then add a description afterwards if needed. In this case, it is apparent from its name that the SMMT is an “industry body”, so we didn’t need that bit.

And finally, “decimated” literally means cut by one tenth. Decimation was a collective punishment in the Roman army in which one soldier in 10 was executed.

However, my ruling is that we do not really need a word that means cut by 10 per cent, and there are plenty of other words in English that mean mostly or utterly destroyed, such as, for example, “destroyed”.

Shut the toolkit: Here is something else we do not need. We wrote about changes at SAP, the software company, “that will require fewer people, and with different skill sets than many of those now at SAP”.

However, we may sometimes have to quote people who use the term. On the sports pages, for example, we reported Ben Youngs’s praise of fellow rugby player Willi Heinz for “consistency of delivering his skillset”. If we think it is worth transcribing such nonsense, we were right to have “skillset” as one word.