Mea Culpa: What an infernal reference, 2,000 years too late

In an article about the European heatwave, we said: “The area of high pressure is named Cerberus after the underworld monster from Dante’s Inferno.” Hold on a moment. We might as well say that it is named after the three-headed dog in Harry Potter. The original Cerberus was the many-headed dog that prevented the inmates from leaving Hades in Greek myth.

It is true that Dante also described Cerberus guarding the gluttons in the third circle of hell, but why we should refer to that version from the 14th century rather than to the original about 2,000 years earlier is a mystery. Thanks to John Harrison for sharing his puzzlement.

Full of regret: Language changes, and it is now pedantic to insist that “hopefully” should refer to someone who is full of hope, as in “he looked at her hopefully”, rather than to mean “I hope that”, as in “hopefully, we will meet again”. But pedantry is good, and raises the tone.

As with hopefully, so with regretfully. Our correspondent wrote, when Hayley Attwell, the actor who is in the latest Mission: Impossible, told her that she would get a helicopter ride from Tom Cruise if she hung around: “That would be fun! Except, regretfully, I don’t think it’s going to happen.” As Paul Edwards pointed out, you are regretful if you have done something you regret; if it’s just a pity, the word is “regrettably”.

Triple trip: We wrote about the latest wonder material that makes more efficient solar panels, saying: “Perovskite’s properties allow it to harvest energy from a greater range of the light spectrum, however until recently it was too unstable to be used outside of laboratory conditions.” The convention is that “but” rather than “however” is used to join two parts of a sentence. “Outside of” is an Americanism up with which we should avoid putting. Finally, “laboratory conditions” is just dead space. We meant: “... but until recently it was too unstable to be used outside a laboratory.”

Vagueries: We had several other examples of the deadening “conditions” in recent days. On Friday, we said that Hollywood writers had been striking over “increased wages, higher streaming residuals and improved working conditions”. I can guess what “streaming residuals” might be – earnings from streamed shows after everyone else has taken their share – but “improved working conditions” is too vague to be worth listing. Be specific or delete.

Horsing about: On Wednesday we quoted Lucy Allan, the Conservative MP, as saying: “The government needs to reign in its spending.” Thanks to Philip Nalpanis, a long-standing friend of this column, for drawing attention to a homophone that itself is like an old friend. We meant “rein in”, as in the horse-riding metaphor.

Losing the thread: In an article last weekend about the battle between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, we said that Zuckerberg, by launching a rival to Twitter, “now plans to hit that illusive billion-user figure”. Thanks to Roger Thetford for spotting “illusive”, which isn’t really a word (although dictionaries define it as “illusory or deceptive”), and noting that we meant “elusive”, hard to grasp or pin down.