Mea Culpa: a tireless effort to dry every eye in the house

In our moving account of an interview with Keir Starmer, which has not yet been broadcast by ITV, we said that “photographs from the taping” show him “with tears in his eyes, as his wife Victoria wiped away tears from the audience”. Several readers commented on the rather startling scene conjured up of the Labour leader’s wife ministering to the TV studio audience, moving along the rows, dabbing at their eyes.

Fortunately, everyone knows what we meant, which was that “his wife Victoria, in the audience, wiped away her own tears”.

I also thought it odd to use the word “taping” rather than “recording”. Terms from previous generations of technology often survive, and we still talk about “rewinding” a video, or “hanging up” on a phone call, but there didn’t seem to be a good reason for this one.

Cummings, lord of chaos: I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but congratulations to Jon Stone for using a figure of speech that was striking and original. His account of the Dominic Cummings saga included this: “Months of silence from the former adviser turned to riotous anger in April after No 10 sources blamed Mr Cummings for leaking the prime minister’s texts.” A reader inquired if he meant “righteous anger”, but I hope he didn’t, because his phrase was much better than the familiar one.

Likely an Americanism: As you know, I am a good-natured and tolerant curmudgeon, and I like many Americanisms. “Fall”, for example, is an evocative 16th-century British English usage (short for “fall of the leaf”) preserved in North American aspic. I even like “gotten”, which was also exported from here before being reimported from there.

But I agree with Sue Alexander, who complains that the use of “likely” instead of “likely to be”, or “probably”, is an Americanism too far. We had a headline last week that read: “Islamophobia within the Conservative Party is likely just the tip of the iceberg.” I am afraid my subliminal reaction to that is: “What does some American know about the prevalence of prejudice in a British political party?”

Rewild the ox: Several readers thought our headline, “Conservationists to ‘rewild’ Scotland over next century,” was an exaggeration, as they discovered on reading the first paragraph of the report that the plan covers a mere 200 acres. The headline was later amended to include the acreage, although the subheadline still said: “Vast tracts of wetlands and native woodland will be restored.”

Even I, with my hazy grasp of how big an acre is (220 yards by 22 yards, so about 200 by 20 metres, or the area that could be ploughed by one person and one ox in a day), agree with Philip Nalpanis, who doesn’t think that 200 acres constitutes “vast tracts”, even allowing for journalistic licence.