Mea Culpa: turn those gas lights off, please

I thought I had put gaslight as a verb on the Banned List, but we nevertheless published an article headlined: “I refuse to be gaslighted by Boris Johnson into believing Covid doesn’t exist.” It is a needlessly dramatic turn of phrase, referring to that film in which the husband tries to make his wife think she is going mad by turning the gas lights up and down.

No one thinks our writer is likely to be persuaded that Covid doesn’t exist; and indeed the debate is not whether it exists or not but how intrusive the response to it should be. Gaslighting has become a tiresome cliche of rhetorical excess, so why not cut it out and say what we mean instead?

Also, I think “gaslighted” reads oddly where I would expect “gaslit”, but as it is on the Banned List, it doesn’t matter because we shall never see it again.

Cycling outfit: We were tripped up by a common misspelling in an interesting article about Geri Halliwell’s union jack minidress. We recalled that Halliwell called Margaret Thatcher “the first Spice Girl”, and noted that “she backpeddled on that a few months later”. That has been changed to “backpedalled”. It is not a great figure of speech, anyway, because backpedalling on most British bicycles doesn’t do anything; even on those continental ones it activates the brakes, whereas the meaning here is going into reverse, so the analogy is with pedals directly attached to the wheel as on a child’s tricycle. But it is definitely nothing to do with peddling, or selling things.

Foot autumn: I didn’t mind “Tube ridership” in our report of the after-effects of the pandemic on London’s public transport: it is an Americanism, but it’s a jaunty phrase. I draw the line at “passenger footfall”, which we said had still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. “Footfall” is an absurd bit of retail industry jargon that should have no place in our pages. “Passenger numbers” would have done fine.

Double top: Titles are a minefield, so congratulations to all concerned for correctly referring to “professors Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance” in our front page story on Tuesday. Individually, they are “Professor Sir Chris Whitty” and “Professor Sir Patrick Vallance”, although we don’t have to use both titles every time. For most of the pandemic, Sir Patrick’s professorial chair was ignored in favour of his knighthood, while Chris Whitty was generally prefaced with Prof. But then he was knighted in the new year honours, so they both have the set, and the correct way to refer to them in full is the way we did it.

Sea plane: A long sentence turned an aircraft into a ship in our report of Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, protesting to the Chinese government. His representations came “after the Australian defence department accused a People’s Liberation Army navy vessel of emanating a laser and illuminating a Royal Australian Air Force maritime surveillance aircraft sailing through the Arafura Sea”. Thanks to John Harrison for pointing this out. I’m not sure about “emanating” or “illuminating” either. We could have said something like “... accused a navy vessel, sailing through the Arafura Sea, north of Australia, of directing a laser at a surveillance aircraft.”