Mea Culpa: sparks fly as knives are sharpened

Our report on the latest figures for recorded crime began: “Knife crime has risen to a new record in England and Wales, sparking calls for authorities to ‘break the spiral of violence’.” I know “sparking” is a useful journalese word, that seems a bit livelier than “prompting”, but it conjured up for me an unfortunate image of thugs sharpening their knives on an old-fashioned grinder, sending sparks flying.

White-water ride: Cliches rise and fall in popularity. I hadn’t seen “raft of measures” for a while, but it cropped up in a news-in-brief item last week. “The absence of a housing bill from the Queen’s Speech has cast doubt on a raft of measures pledged by the last prime minister,” we reported.

I was so pleased to see it, and the accompanying vision of Theresa May lashing logs of legislation together and launching them down the rapids running through parliament before they were lost in a hidden backwater, that I wondered if I should campaign for the phrase to be used more often.

What should we call him? In last week’s column I asked whether we should call Leo Varadkar “taoiseach” or “Irish prime minister”. Strong feelings were expressed on both sides, which I ignored, and good arguments were made on both sides, from which I learned.

I know how important it is to Irish people – I am part Irish myself – to have the symbols of their nationhood recognised. But my question was one of clarity of communication: it is not our purpose as journalists to trade in the symbols of Irish nationalism but to be understood. As long as it is not wrong, more people will understand what is meant by “Irish prime minister” than by “taoiseach”.

And it is not wrong. The Irish constitution says: “The president shall, on the nomination of Dail Eireann, appoint the taoiseach, that is, the head of the government or prime minister.”

On the other hand, several correspondents made the unanswerable point that it was a bit rich for a column called Mea Culpa to suggest that words from other languages should be shunned for the sake of ready comprehension.

It is true that one of my rules for writing is to avoid words from foreign or dead languages, but this needs to be balanced by the joy of discovering new words that are apt or interesting or poetic.

Given that taoiseach is a good word, and that its meaning is usually deducible from its context, there is a case for sharing some of the language of our closest neighbours (closer even than the French).

If this isn’t too much of a Booker Prize conclusion, I think we should use “taoiseach” and “Irish prime minister” interchangeably according to taste and context.