Mea Culpa: Numbering system at sixes and sevens

The British motorway numbering system is reasonably logical, so you can see how this happened. On Thursday, our “On this day” feature said that in 1958 “the Preston bypass, Britain’s first section of motorway (the M1, eight-and-a-half miles long) was officially opened by prime minister Harold Macmillan”.

As several readers pointed out, the Preston bypass is part of the M6.

Money, money, money: In an article about Bill Sweeney, the boss of the Rugby Football Union (RFU), being paid a lot, we misspelt “remuneration” as “renumeration” in describing the committee that made the decision. I don’t feel remotely penitent about this, as remuneration is a ridiculous word. It is from the Latin munus, gift, the same root as “money”, rather than from the Latin numerus, number, and is only ever used as a euphemism; as reader Richard Hanson-James pointed out, it is “corporate speak for snouts in the trough”.

The same article reported the losses made by the RFU, and the number of staff made redundant, and said: “Amid this landscape, Sweeney pocketed £1.1m.” We should feel penitent about this: the phrase we were struggling towards may have been “against this background”, and, while it is fine to use “landscape” metaphorically, “amid” is the wrong word to describe the contrast between penury and greed.

Sharp point: Writing about A&E departments in the NHS, we said: “The number of patients coming through the front door and the acuity of their problems seems to be ever increasing.” I haven’t seen “acuity” used like this before, but Gavin Turner, a reader, tells me it is an American medical term meaning “acuteness”, where in British English we would say “seriousness”. Most of the time, “acuity” means “sharpness”, especially of mind.

The price of Assad: On Monday, one of our headlines read: “Can the West afford for Syria’s dictator to be ousted?” I know what we meant, but it is clumsy. “Afford for” is not the normal construction. “Can the West afford the ousting of Syria’s dictator?” would have been better.

Long sciency word warning: In a review of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s intrusion on his children’s privacy by permitting a TV documentary to be made about his family, we said he “denies the reality of anthropomorphic climate change”. But “anthropomorphic” means thinking of animals or objects as if they are human. We meant “anthropogenic”, caused by humans, as Paul Edwards pointed out.

In any case, I am not sure Rees-Mogg does deny it – I suspect that he disagrees with the Independent writer’s view of what to do about it.

In another article about the Rees-Mogg programme, we described him as a divisive figure, and said: “During his long political career, outrage followed him around like his hoard of six offspring.” We changed this to “horde”, although we are sure that he does also regard them as a store of treasure.

Early Roman football news: In “Sports news in brief” on Sunday, a headline declared: “Kluivert scores ‘historic’ three penalties for Pompei.” I am a “Christmas” football watcher, who watches on special occasions – World Cup, Euros – so I failed to notice this howler, drawn to my attention by Michael Webster. The nickname of Justin Kluivert’s club, Bournemouth, is the Cherries, as the report below the headline said. The headline writer was obviously thinking of Portsmouth, whose nickname is Pompey. Nobody knows why, but none of the theories about its origin has anything to do with the town near Mount Vesuvius.

Referee! In a news story about the assisted dying bill, we said that Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, “said that it was ‘right’ to consider whether patients should cover the cost of an assisted death themselves, referencing that this is what happens when people go to Switzerland”. This ungainly sentence is what happens when “referring” is poshed up to “referencing”. We could have said: “... referring to what happens when people go to Switzerland”.