Mea culpa: open the windows on the experts

We ran a “home news in brief” item earlier this week that I found impossible to understand. It was headlined, “Room ventilation must improve to beat Omicron, say experts,” which was a bad start. It ought to be a rule not to use the word “expert” in a headline, because it tells the reader nothing about the sort of expertise that is claimed by whichever authority is being quoted.

Worse, the news story, which was only a paragraph long, gave us no further details, except to say that “researchers” had studied “the minimum dose of virus particles necessary to cause an infection for each variant”.

Nor were the findings of this study reported in a useful way. We said: “Experts have warned that room ventilation rates need to be some 50 times higher to prevent the spread of Omicron.” Does that just mean the windows should be left open, or is there some other way of calculating a 50-fold increase in ventilation rates?

The report said that the researchers had put their findings into a “Wells-Riley equation”, which I suppose I could look up if I really needed to know, but by then I had decided that the return on the investment of my time was likely to be low.

Thanks to Roger Thetford for drawing this item to my attention: he had been alerted by reference, in the single paragraph, to the phrase “airborne-transmitted diseases” and then “airborne-transmissible diseases”. As he said, “airborne diseases” was what was wanted in both cases, but I am not sure it would have helped.

Get off the fence: Language changes, as this column always acknowledges, but The Independent should avoid being at the leading edge of change, because new usages seem wrong or discordant to some readers, and that undermines our authority. We referred to “those still sat on the fence” in a headline on a comment article. The traditional form is “those still sitting”, as Richard Thomas wrote to remind us.

Soundalikes: We confused our “mitigate” and “militate” in an editorial last week, as Linda Beeley and Mark Ogilvie pointed out. Commenting on Boris Johnson’s appearance at the UN climate meeting in Egypt, we said that if it hadn’t been for people like him, “it wouldn’t already be too late to mitigate against the worst effects of climate change”.

It was an easy enough sentence to edit, because we simply deleted the “against”. You “militate against” something – that is, make it difficult, from the Latin for “take up arms against” – or you “mitigate” something, which means make it less harmful.

It wasn’t the only time we departed from conventional usage, because in another editorial we said that “lenders had to take instant and severe action to mitigate against the consequences of one of the superficially cleverest chancellors in the country’s history – Kwasi Kwarteng – having delivered the most chaotic mini-Budget in living memory.” Again, “against” should have been deleted.

Wicked Budget: Incidentally, that editorial was headlined, “Pity Hunt and Sunak for the enormity of their task.” For some readers, “enormity” means wickedness, referring to the greatness of a moral transgression rather than simply size. We could have just said “scale” instead.