Mea Culpa: how many shoes does Donald Trump have?

One price of The Independent’s huge success in attracting readers in the US is that we have to work ever harder to maintain a consistent British English style. It is easy enough to observe the conventions of spelling and grammar that differ between British and US English, although we sometimes miss them, not least because we now employ so many American journalists in the US.

What is harder to avoid, though, is American idioms, many of which are finding their way into British English anyway. Ian K Watson, one of our UK readers, was puzzled to come across the phrase, “shoes appear to be dropping fast”, in an article about the FBI raiding Donald Trump’s home in Florida.

I think it is an extension of the US phrase “waiting for the other shoe to drop”, which means bracing yourself for a bad thing you know is going to happen, derived from living in cheap flats – sorry, apartments – in which you could hear the residents above taking their shoes off, one by one.

I assume that what we meant by “shoes appear to be dropping fast” is that, after the first attempt by law enforcement to hold the former president to account, the inevitable next steps seem to be happening quickly.

Not a 5p coin: Henry Peacock, another UK reader, was similarly nonplussed by a reference to Rudy Giuliani “shilling for Trump in the 2020 election”. He could guess what “shilling” meant from the context, but thought that it was needlessly obscure. I admit I had only a hazy idea of what it means, from being accused of it on social media. I assumed it meant a paid propagandist, but the Oxford dictionary gives a more specific meaning: “A person who pretends to give an impartial endorsement of something in which they themselves have an interest.”

It comes from US slang for the accomplice of a swindler who pretends to be a customer to entice others. In which case it is not really the right word for Giuliani, who never made any secret of his financial relationship with Trump, as his personal lawyer.

Anti-aircraft fire: Still in the US, we reported Liz Cheney’s “historic” speech on losing the Wyoming primary election, and compared it with President Carter’s “malaise” speech of 1979. We said he “got a lot of flack for that speech 43 years ago”.  We meant “flak”, which is German for anti-aircraft fire, an abbreviation of a longer German word. “Flack” is borderline-obsolete US slang for a public relations person. Thanks to Paul Edwards for spotting that one.

Bear with: We nearly got this wrong, but it was spotted in time. We were about to say that the borders of North Rhine-Westphalia were “borne of necessity, not history”, but the “e” was deleted before publication. The two spellings are of the same word, meaning “carry”, but without the “e” has the specific meaning of giving birth. Necessity gave birth to the state’s borders.

Sewage, sewage everywhere: In a report about the water companies’ environmental record, we said: “In total, sewage was pumped out into the environment for more than 9 million hours or 392,806 days during the five-year period.” As Iain Boyd wrote to point out, this is confusing, because that is 1,000 years compressed into just five. What we mean is that there are a lot of discharges happening at the same time, but adding time in this way makes no sense: what we needed was the number of discharges and the average duration of each.

More or less: Finally, two more common numerical confusions. We referred in an opinion article to “here, now, in the second decade of the 21st century”. It is actually the third. We did that with someone’s age recently, too, saying that, on turning 70, they had entered their seventh decade, when the seventies is the eighth decade of life.

And in “Home news in brief”, we said: “Younger adults now watch almost seven times less scheduled TV than those aged 65 or over.” Thanks to Nigel Fox for pointing out that this mixes words for increase and decrease. It is always easier to invert sentences such as these, like this: “People aged 65 or over now watch seven times more scheduled TV than younger adults.”