Mea Culpa: instances of the incidence of incidents

We confused incidence and incident(s) a few times last week. In a report of failings of the Metropolitan Police, we referred to “a suspected incidence of domestic violence”. In a report of waste falling from aeroplanes we said that a local councillor “asked whether there had been similar incidences in the past”. And last Sunday we quoted Priti Patel, the home secretary, who said that we have to learn “from incidences that have taken place”.

Thanks to Richard Parry for drawing these to my attention, and for sharing his theory that the confusion may be influenced by the word “instance”. I think he may be right: it’s not just that the plural of incident sounds the same as incidence.

Anyway, incidence is a statistical term for the rate at which something occurs, or a geometric term to refer to the angle at which lines or surfaces intersect, and it is rarely plural. I don’t know what Patel actually said, but we should have changed it to “incidents”.

A bit previous: The same report about the killing of Sir David Amess said that the home secretary “was considering multiple measures to safeguard MPs, including asking constituents to pre-book appointments with their elected representatives”. Leaving aside the now-endemic use of “multiple” to mean “several”, Mick O’Hare wrote to revive a long-running debate about whether the “pre-” is needed in “pre-book”. On this I take a pragmatic approach, which is that although booking an appointment is something you do in advance, it does no harm to emphasise the beforehandness of the exercise.

Dumpster fire: This headline on a video report never really took off: “Plane crashes into fireball outside Texas as smoke and flames rise from wreckage.” Thanks to Paul Edwards for drawing it to my attention. We meant “outside Houston, Texas” – “outside Texas” being an unhelpful guide – and the rest of the headline got itself into a narrative tangle. The fireball was the result of the plane crashing into the ground, and it consisted of smoke and flames which continued to rise from the wreckage afterwards, not “as” the plane crashed. “Plane crashes in fireball” would have made sense, followed by the correct location and then possibly a dash “– smoke and flames seen rising from wreckage”.

Immanence: In a fine article about how the Irish see Britain, we wrote: “Ireland’s history of struggle is everywhere; in the bullet-marked central Dublin buildings, the IRA graveyards scattered across the country, the books, in rebel songs in pubs and in sport. It envelopes Ireland, it is inescapable.” This doesn’t come up often, but the convention is that envelop, the verb, is written without a final “e”, which is reserved for the noun. So that should be “envelops”, even if my spell-checker thinks it’s wrong. Thanks to Henry Peacock for pointing it out.

Double rocket: We had an excess of unspecified rocketings in a News in Brief item about court backlogs. As Keith Bennett pointed out, we said “average crown court waiting times have rocketed to 230 days” without saying what they were before, and then that the number of rape and sexual assault cases over a year old had been “rocketing by 435 per cent since March 2020”, in this case with no information about the numbers. Our style is not to use percentages greater than 100 in any case: we would normally call a rise of 400 per cent a five-fold increase; but we should always give enough information so that the reader has some idea what a number has changed from and to.