Mea Culpa: as the French say, how yellow is your protest?

We got our hyphens in a twist in an attempt to convey the message of an interview with the shadow business secretary. “Miliband: Tackle injustices alongside climate or risk yellow vest-style protests.” It did not help that we were trying to fit so many ideas into a short headline, but the hyphen was where it really went wrong. It implies yellow protests in the style of a vest, as John Harrison wrote to point out.

The simplest way to make sense of this is to drop the “-style” altogether, and to have Ed Miliband warn against “yellow vest” protests in quotation marks. The trouble is that “yellow vest” is a silly phrase in English; what Miliband actually said was: “Look at what happened with Macron and the so-called gilets jaunes in France.” Yellow vests is a literal translation: in normal English we would say “hi-vis jackets”; but to call them “hi-vis jacket” protests would have been even sillier.

The whole headline needed radical surgery anyway: the abstract “injustices” and the truncated “climate” (short for “climate emergency”) made it hard to understand before we got near the hyphen pile-up. Another of Miliband’s sentences was perfectly clear and would have fitted the headline space with the lightest of editing: “Miliband: ‘Going down this green road has got to be seen as fair.’”

Not so ancient history: The difference between historic (important) and historical (in the past) is arbitrary, but it is one of those conventions worth observing, because it affects some readers’ opinion of us. In most of our coverage of the row about old tweets posted by Ollie Robinson, the cricketer, we called them “historical”, but Keith Bennett spotted this headline: “Robinson ban for historic racist tweets ‘over the top’.”

In fact, I don’t think “historical” is the right word either, for this story, as the tweets were posted in 2012 and 2013, which is just eight years ago. In the article under that headline, we called them “decade-old” tweets, which again isn’t accurate. Perhaps “teenage” would have been the best adjective, as Robinson was 18 and 19 at the time.

Step on the crease: Staying with the cricket, and a different Ollie, we discussed the erratic form of some of the England team: “Similar questions are being asked of Ollie Pope, though the Surrey batsman’s feet are either side of the acceptable line he’s been towing for a good while now.” I think we were trying to say that he is sometimes good enough to be in the national team and sometimes not, but if his feet are near a metaphorical line he would be toeing it, not pulling it along.

Rein of error: An old favourite spotted by Roger Thetford. We said that Ruth Lea, the economist, had “joined calls for the government to reign in its current quantitative easing targets”. It is a horse-riding metaphor, rather than a royal one: we meant “rein in”.

Meet point: Last weekend we reported that “the Queen will meet with Joe Biden when he visits the UK for the G7 summit later this month, Buckingham Palace has confirmed”. I can’t find the press release from the royal family, but I doubt if it said “meet with” – although that might have been a nice touch, to talk about an American president in his own language. I assume we took it from an international news agency which had translated the original into US English. We should have translated it back into British English, which is, as Mick O’Hare pointed out, “meet”.