Mea Culpa: Give Boris Johnson a merit star for self-awareness

Give the prime minister a merit star for self-awareness, I thought, when I read this headline: “Johnson warned he would be signing political ‘death warrant’ by demoting Sunak.” For a moment I thought we were reporting that Boris was warning courtiers who pressed him to demote his chancellor that this was not a good idea. Then I realised that it was written in Reflexive Headlinese, in which Johnson was being warned by unnamed others – indeed, by anonymous Conservative MPs – who thought it was a bad idea. It would not have done any harm to slip “is” between “Johnson” and “warned”.

Amidships: Another headline on the same story was a victim of a different curse of headline-speak: amiditis. “Boris Johnson told to ‘stop picking fights and get a grip’ amid Rishi Sunak row,” we wrote. There at least it was clear who was doing the telling, but it wasn’t “in the middle of a row about Rishi Sunak”, which is what “amid” suggests, making it sound as if two unrelated things happened at the same time. The telling off of the prime minister was part of the row. “In” would have been fine. Or “after”, in the sense that the unnamed Tory MPs were responding to the initial fuss over reports of the prime minister’s alleged joke about making Sunak health secretary. Anything but “amid”.

That wasn’t the silliest use of “amid” last week, however. That prize was awarded to this headline, reported to the authorities by David Hatcher: “‘No one is above the law’, says Scotland Yard chief amid Prince Andrew lawsuit.”

Small cats: In a report of the discovery of bodies of Ice Age lions preserved in Siberian permafrost, we referred to “the house cat-sized cubs”. As John Harrison pointed out, the placing of the hyphen suggested the existence of something called house cubs. We needed a hyphen between house and cat, with a second one between cat and sized being optional – or we could do what we did, which was to rewrite: “The cubs, the size of house cats and dubbed Boris and Sparta…”

Enough of experts: In our coverage of Geronimo the alpaca we quoted Dr Iain McGill and called him “a bovine TB expert and practicing vet”. First, he is practising veterinary medicine: “practising” is a verb, so in British English it is spelt with an “s”. Thanks to Keith Bennett for the reminder. Second, we should avoid the term “expert” when there is a more precise alternative. Here we could call him “a vet who specialises in bovine TB” (which would also do away with the need to spell practising). Finally, one of the rules promulgated by Guy Keleny, my predecessor as author of this column, was that we should try even harder to avoid the word “expert” in headlines, as this implies that The Independent vouches for what they say. So “‘All hell will break loose’ if Geronimo is killed but tests negative for TB, says expert” could have been “... says vet”.

Back trouble: Some rather strange gymnastics were suggested by this headline on our sports pages: “Cricketer gets hit in the groin twice in back-to-back deliveries.” As Paul Edwards suggested, perhaps “consecutive” would have been better than “back-to-back”. Or just “two”.