Mea culpa: No one’s to blame if the song remains the same

One of my considered opinions is that journalists worry too much about repeating words. This anxiety has spawned a cottage industry in what is ironically known as “elegant variation”, by which we find increasingly elaborate ways of rephrasing, say, Kylie Minogue as “the Antipodean songstress”.

Sometimes the result is that we fail to make sense. In an article about the cellist who suggested that “Rule, Britannia!” should be axed from the BBC’s Proms, we quoted him as saying that people “don’t realise how uncomfortable a song like that can make a lot of people feel”.

By way of explanation, we went on: “The tune refers to Britain’s colonial past and involvement in mass enslavement.” But it is not the tune that refers to these things, as Philip Nalpanis pointed out. We were trying to avoid repeating the word “song” in the previous sentence but made the wrong choice. We could have happily repeated “song” – the reader wouldn’t have noticed and it would have made sense – or we could have said: “The words refer to…”

Missing “r”: We were nearly right in our report of the US Supreme Court decision on Wednesday. It rejected claims on behalf of Kenneth Smith that carrying out his death sentence put him “at undue risk of a tortuous death that would amount to cruel and unusual punishment”, and that it would therefore violate the constitution.

Thanks to Roger Thetford for pointing out that we meant “torturous”, relating to torture, rather than “tortuous”, which means twisting or winding. Both words come from the same source, the Latin torquere, to twist, turn, wind, wring or distort, but the kind of twisting that gave us “torture” diverged in spelling long before the words arrived in English via French.

Founder and loser: In “Home news in brief” on Tuesday we described Stephen Yaxley Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, as “the former English Defence League founder”. As Martin Smith pointed out, he remains a founder even if he fell out with the organisation he founded. Perhaps we should have called him “the founder of the EDL, of which he is no longer a member”.

Non-fatal disaster: In one of our video stories we invited readers to watch “Tory London mayor candidate Susan Hall’s car crash interview”. I have been sensitive about the phrase “car crash interview” since we applied it to an interview with Natalie Bennett, the former leader of the Green Party, whose mother was killed in a car crash. Fatal road accidents are common enough for a lot of people to have been affected by them, so we should think of another way of describing an interview that seemed to go badly.

I’ll be there: In a “World news in brief” last Sunday, under the excellent headline “Snake’s on a plane” we reported the story of a snake in the overhead compartments on a Thai AirAsia flight from Bangkok to Phuket. “It was identified as a Blanford’s bridle snake, a small, non-venomous species,” we said, before it was swept into a rubbish bag. We ended the report by saying: “The Independent reached out to AirAsia for comment.”

Thanks to John Schluter for reminding us that we are The Independent, not the Four Tops. We contact people to ask them for comment.

Anachronism: We had an unexpected headline last weekend: “Roman shell discovered by amateur archaeologists.” You don’t have to know much about ancient technology to know that the Romans, advanced though they were, did not invent explosives. We said that the group of amateur archaeologists had unearthed a Roman dodecahedron – a 12-sided metal object – “that has baffled experts for centuries”.

That also baffled Roger Thetford, who couldn’t initially work out how something that had just been discovered could have had that effect for so long. It became clear that what the amateurs had found was an example of an object that, in the past, has left archaeologists at a loss. In which case, we shouldn’t really have called it a “shell” because that implies that we know what it was, and that it had some kind of military use.