Mea Culpa: the singularity of those Britney Spears fans

We had a headline on the “skyline” – the strip across the top of our front page – last weekend that read: “Why Britney fans are so unique.” This is a pedant’s favourite: that you cannot have degrees of uniqueness. The etymological point of being unique is that something is the only one, from Latin unicus, a form of unus, meaning “one”.

Of course, it is fine to use unique to mean remarkable or unusual, just as people sometimes talk about things being more or less inevitable, or the preamble of the US constitution seeks a “more perfect union”. But I think it is better not to put pedant-bait at the top of the front page, when there are so many other, possibly better ways of saying the same thing. If pressed for time, we could just have gone for: “Why Britney fans are so special.”

Going round in circles: In our “Politics Explained” feature about the meaning of the “Global Britain” slogan we said: “The UK, uniquely, sat at the centre of many valuable concentric circles.” This was a pedant-proof use of “uniquely”, but we got our concentric circles in a muddle, as Roger Thetford wrote to remind us.

We said that these circles had included the “special relationship” with America; Nato; permanent membership of the UN Security Council; the “Five Eyes” intelligence network (with the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand); the Commonwealth; a historic role in the Middle East; and a lead role in the the European Union.

The point about concentric circles is that they share the same centre, hence the name, and therefore the smaller ones are wholly inside the larger ones. That does not work, unless the countries of the Commonwealth are all members of the EU, or vice versa. Here, we were talking about a Venn diagram of intersecting circles (or ovals), with Britain occupying – uniquely – the one part where they all overlap.

Muddy waters: In our foreign news in brief we said: “Jakarta hit by monsoon floods as over 1,000 evacuated.” As John Harrison pointed out, that implies that the evacuation was in progress when the floods came along and made things difficult. The “as” there is acting a bit like “amid”, linking two clauses and muddying cause and effect. The evacuation was a result of the floods, so the headline could have said: “Jakarta hit by monsoon floods, forcing evacuation of 1,000.” (And we never need “over” or “up to”, and definitely not in headlines: just give a number that tells the reader the scale of the thing.)

Vaccinate whom?: In an editorial about the vexed subject of vaccine passports we said: “Surgeons are not allowed to operate on patients without a vaccination for hepatitis, something that few would argue with.” Thanks to Roger Thetford (again), for pointing out that this was ambiguous, as the reader stumbles over whether it is the surgeons or the patients who must be vaccinated. We could have said “surgeons without a vaccination for hepatitis are not allowed to operate on patients”, or we could simply have deleted “patients”, as their part is implied by the word “operate”.