Mea Culpa: Read all about it

Tory minister slammed after claiming Labour new towns would be ‘filled with illegal migrants’”, read a somewhat alarming headline on our homepage last week. “Slam” is a word that is frowned upon by the sub-editing department, but our writers have still managed to use it a number of times in the past week. It’s acceptable in the context of a violent incident, such as a missile strike or a car hitting a wall – and obviously when writing about sport – but we should not use it to mean “criticise”, in the same way that we shouldn’t say someone “blasted” someone else for doing something they didn’t approve of.

This sort of language is unnecessary. The Independent is not a tabloid newspaper and does not need to sensationalise its articles; attempting to do so can distract and put off our readers, who I like to think have chosen us for our measured and factual coverage of stories whose details are often quite shocking enough on their own.

On probation: Another word that is supposed to be banned from our reporting is “probe”, in the sense of “investigate”. Sadly, this instruction is frequently ignored, leading to some awkward and rather inappropriate headlines – such as one that read “Police officer dubbed ‘lesbian nana’ probed after pepper spray video”, which appeared on our site last week.

It can be hard to fit a word like “investigated” into the space allocated for a headline, and so the shorter word is convenient, but we should avoid using it in a context that could evoke its other meaning, which the Oxford dictionary gives as being to “physically explore or examine (something) with the hands or an instrument”. And that’s before we even consider the word “dubbed”, which I think is acceptable only when writing about sound recording.

It may surprise readers to learn that “dub” is a very old word, according to Wiktionary, coming from the Old English dubban (“to knight by striking with a sword”) which in turn may derive from the Old French adober (“equip with arms; adorn”). This should afford it legitimacy, one might think, but it is precisely the borrowing of once-respectable, ancient words to replace modern ones, purely for the purpose of front-page brevity, that some of us find a bit, well, non-U.

Life is but a dream: In an unusual report about a couple who had found a way to live with their pets in London on the (relatively) cheap, we described how, “Facing the unrealistic prospect of being able to afford a house big enough for them and their furry family”, they had ended up buying a boat. Expressing a negative can be difficult for writers, because there are so many ways to get it wrong. In this instance, we managed to convey the idea that the pair were in fact in a position to afford the hypothetical house, but that this was somehow, at the same time, not plausible. Which didn’t make any sense. It was changed to “Given the low likelihood of being able to afford a house ...”.

International incidents: In a World news in brief item last week, we said: “Japan notoriously has a low crime rate which many put down to their ‘national culture’ of social harmony and observance of hierarchy.” “Notorious” is generally used in a negative sense, while a low incidence of crime is “generally regarded as a virtue”, said reader Henry Peacock. He also drew our attention to a second item, titled “Man, 82, chokes to death after eating live octopus”, which went on to state that the octopus in question was actually dead (though still wriggling, apparently). It was a confusing article, and although it did its best to explain the circumstances, Mr Peacock is right that we ought to have made up our minds about the vital status of the poor creature.

Beg to differ: The headline of an article about the terrible situation in Israel and Gaza read: “Families of those taken by Hamas plea for peace”. It’s an old-fashioned word, and thus not everyone is familiar with it, but the verb form of “plea” is “plead”, so it was changed accordingly. Of course, you can enter a plea, or make one, but it’s still a noun in those contexts.

Order, order: Kind reader Roger Thetford wrote promptly to inform us that we had used the wrong word in an editorial the other day, again about the conflict in the Middle East. “Smaller but still numerous Islamist forces are arraigned on its borders,” we said in a paragraph describing Israel’s situation. The word we should have used, of course, was “arrayed”.

However, I should like to make a plea for clemency on the grounds that Samuel Johnson, in the ninth edition of his Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1805, says this:

To ARRAIGN. v.a. [arranger, Fr. to set in order.]

1. To set a thing in order, or in its place. One is said to arraign a writ in a county, that fits it for trial before the justices of the circuit.

Johnson only gives the modern sense of it as a second definition:

2. To accuse; to charge with faults in general, as in controversy, in a satire.

He also cites a chap called John Cowell, who I believe was the author of a somewhat controversial legal dictionary, first published a couple of centuries earlier. So while his primary definition of arraign might now be obsolete, we’re definitely not the first publication to have used it in that sense.

On that note, I shall go and try to put some more of our copy in order. Till next time, remember: always let the story speak for itself.