Mea Culpa: health service in a grammatical crisis

We were caught out by short headlines a couple of times in recent days, both of them on news stories about the problems of the health service. One headline said: “A&E delays killing up to 500 people a week, top expert warns.” Most readers will have taken the intended meaning from that, I am sure, but others will have stumbled over it, trying to work out why accident and emergency departments would kill people, let alone why they should postpone these dreadful murders. We inserted “are” after “delays”.

Incidentally, we should also be wary of the word “expert”, and try to be more specific. In this case, the warning came from Dr Adrian Boyle, the president of Royal College of Emergency Medicine, so his warning was certainly to be taken seriously, and “top doctor” would have been better.

The other headline was: “Health chiefs warn NHS to remain in crisis until Easter.” Again, the ambiguity may have passed many readers by, but John Harrison wrote to say that this sounded like an order: that health chiefs were instructing the NHS to remain in crisis. A “will” instead of “to” would have fixed it.

Lough blough: Several readers pointed out that we referred to a “snowplow” in a caption to a photo of one in Scotland on Monday, but only one anonymous contributor was witty enough to suggest that we must have meant “snoughplow”.

Pull down the statue: Double trouble in an article about Andrew Tate, of whom I was unaware until he tangled with Greta Thunberg on Twitter. “If they have any sense at all, his Muslim supporters will distance themselves from the man they previously pedestaled,” we wrote. This is not only American verbing but American spelling too. If we were to accept “pedestal” as a verb, we would have spelt it “pedestalled”. But we do not, so we changed it to “... the man they previously placed on a pedestal.”

Police report: In “Home news in brief” we reported: “Police found the 20-year-old victim with multiple gunshot wounds and head injuries on patrol in Camberwell Church Street.” As John Armitage pointed out, it was the police who were on patrol, not the victim, and certainly not the victim’s head injuries. The sentence should have started: “Police on patrol in Camberwell Church Street…” And we didn’t need “multiple”. We rarely do, as “several” is a more natural word, but here the plural “gunshot wounds” was what a keen detective might recognise as a clue that there were more than one of them.

Negative that: A report of new figures from the Office for National Statistics said that they “showed that fewer people own a car or a van than they did 10 years ago”. Roger Thetford, a reader, said that he cheered inwardly at this news that the dominion of motor vehicles might be receding at last. But then he read the next sentence: “At least 23.3 per cent of households didn’t own a car or a van in 2021, down from 25.6 per cent in 2011.” So what we meant was that fewer people (strictly, households) didn’t own a car or a van. We trudged back to traffic-congested reality and changed “fewer” to “more”.