Mea Culpa: not something that we should take laying down

A caption on one of our Pictures of the Day (above) said it showed people “laying” in the street in Kolkata. No doubt they were sat on the road before they lied. Thanks to Richard Thomas for pointing it out. Our style is to have them “lying” in the street. The caption went on to say that they were demanding “a halt to the ongoing state legislative election” during the pandemic. We didn’t need “ongoing” or “legislative” in that sentence: they added nothing.

Not so high: In a report of Jordan’s Prince Hamzah being put under house arrest, we referred to King Abdullah’s “ascension” to the throne. It is not wrong, but, as Philip Nalpanis said, “ascent” is the usual form – and it is shorter – when referring to thrones, mountains or hot-air balloons. “Ascension” usually refers to the singular event, “the ascension” to heaven of Jesus. Not even believers in the divine right of kings apply it to monarchs.

Implausible precision: In a report of job losses in the retail industry, we gave some implausibly precise numbers. As Simon Gamble pointed out, the phrase “around 11,986 jobs were cut” mixed the language of approximation with a meaningless number. Perhaps the Centre for Retail Research, whose figures we were reporting, knows exactly how many jobs had gone, but it would have made more sense as “around 12,000 jobs” – and it would have been easier on the reader too.

The same goes for “up to 401,690 shops” having shut, which would have been better phrased as, for example, “as many as 400,000 shops”. (Needless to say, we didn’t say “shut”, we said “shuttered”: I think we could have done without that, too.)

“Up to” is a particular curse of journalism. It always reminds me of sales that advertise in big writing “Up to 25 per cent off”, only for the poor customer to discover that the items they actually want are in fact still selling at “up to” full price. If we know the number, we can delete “up to”, and if it’s an estimate we should ideally give the lower end of the range as well.

The other problem with “up to” is that it can leave us not knowing whether we are coming or going, as when we reported that “England is set to suffer a sharp drop in coronavirus vaccine doses with numbers falling by up to half a million a week until the end of July”.

Turn it down: We said that when India and Pakistan announced a ceasefire along their de facto border last month this was “dialling down months of hostility”. Cole Davis wrote to say that the phrase didn’t make sense to him, as he thought of an old telephone with a rotary dial. I think it probably refers to turning a volume dial on some audio equipment, but it is one of those vogue phrases that makes me think, “Isn’t there a better way of saying this?”

The price of fame: An opinion article about Joe Biden’s small attempt at gun control began: “Though the aim of disarming the citizens of the United States is famously futile …” It should be easy to write some code that would simply delete the word “famous” or “famously” whenever it was uploaded to our website. Either readers know about the futility of trying to curb Americans’ rights as claimed under the second amendment, in which case “famously” is unnecessary, or they do not, in which case it is insulting because it implies that they should.