Mea Culpa: matter of inches out in towering achievement

I have to report that a complaint has been received and only partially upheld. Last weekend we reported: “A Frenchman has officially set a world record for the tallest matchstick sculpture with his 23.6ft model of the Eiffel Tower after initially being snubbed by the Guinness Book of World Records.”

A reader suggested that, since the model maker was French, we should have given the height of the tower in metres (7.19, since you ask). Despite The Independent’s generally pro-EU and modern-minded readership, however, our style is to use feet and inches for this kind of thing.

However, our style is feet and inches, not feet and decimal fractions of feet, so 23.6ft was confusing. It is the same mistake made by all the English-language reports of this story, so I assume it is in the original news agency copy. My research (a few minutes on Google) has established that the height of the tower accepted by Guinness World Records (to give the publication its more up-to-date title) is indeed 7.19 metres. This is 23ft 7in, the 0.6 of a foot being seven inches, which is what we should have put.

Anyway, we should set all that aside, because I am grateful to our complainant for drawing this story to my attention. Whoever wrote the headline, “That’s an Eiffel lot of matches”, deserves a medal. It made my day.

Eggstraordinary: We reported last Sunday on an archaeological dig at Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, which discovered a chicken’s egg preserved from Roman times. A scan showed that its contents were still intact, which excited Edward Biddulph, the project manager at Oxford Archaeology who oversaw the excavation. We quoted him as saying: “We were absolutely blown away when we saw the contents in there, as we might have expected them to have leeched out.”

Thanks to Roger Thetford for reminding us that this should be “leached”. Leech, as a verb, means cure, originally from Old English for doctor or magician, although it was later confused with applying leeches medicinally.  Leach, on the other hand, means “wash or drain by percolation of water” from a different Old English word that also gave us “leak”.

Hello sailor: Another variant spelling of words that sound the same had us accusing the Conservatives of “naval-gazing”. We meant they were engaged in pointless self-reflection, gazing at their navel, or belly button, rather than wondering whether the UK has enough fighting ships. Thanks to Philip Nalpanis.

Shipwreck: In other shipping news on Tuesday we reported: “Wreck of ship vanished by storms found after 84 years.” It was a dramatic tale, reminiscent of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, the story of the 1975 tragedy, also in Lake Superior, told by Gordon Lightfoot, but it was spoiled by the distracting use of “vanish” as a transitive verb in the headline. Storms don’t “vanish” ships, they sink them.

Self-hating latest: We had our word order in a twist on Wednesday: “The meeting has reignited fears of widespread antisemitism within the Labour Party among Jewish members.” After Bernard Theobald intervened, we moved the last three words to earlier in the sentence: “The meeting has reignited fears among Jewish members…”

Mass and volume: In our report of a new weight-loss injection, we said: “The main difference, according to experts, is the sheer volume of weight you can lose.” Which seems to bend the laws of physics. Thanks to Linda Beeley, that has been changed to “sheer amount of weight”.