Mea Culpa: Brief encounter

It is the season for excess, and we delivered a bounty of errors in a fascinating feature that chronicled the rise, fall, and rise again of a certain retailer (and its lingerie). “M&S knickers barely need mentioning – who could live without them? – but what’s impressive is their tenacity for innovation,” we wrote, getting our own undercrackers in something of a twist.

First, it almost read as though we meant that the knickers themselves, rather than the company, were keen to innovate (though one would hope they are tenacious, in their own way; nobody wants to go about in loosely waisted drawers). So that was confusing. But I don’t think tenacity was the word we were looking for in any case. Capacity, perhaps? That would seem more, well, fitting.

This was followed by some precarious grammar, as we said: “But it has taken more than a pair of pants to have created such a retail fairytale.” These constructions are always tricky to get right, but in our efforts to be correct we ended up with an embarras de richesses – in English, too many haves. It would have been fine if we had said “to create such a retail fairytale” and left it at that.

But there was more. In 1997, we wrote, the company achieved profits of £1bn, “but it pre-eclipsed a sharp, almost fatal decline”. Again, that is an interesting choice of word, but not, I suspect, the correct one; indeed, it is quite possible that we made it up. To eclipse generally means to obscure, and it seems more likely that if any eclipsing took place, it was in the form of the sharp downturn in the retailer’s fortunes overshadowing its previous success. I think we might have meant “preceded”.

Potted beef: Readers were treated to a rather unimaginative headline last week, which announced: “Mad cow disease case confirmed in cow on Scottish farm.” Just to be sure that they had fully understood the situation, we followed this up with a subheadline that read: “Mad cow disease has been detected in a cow in Scotland.” Given that mad cow disease is specific to one animal – there are variants that affect other species, but they have different names – we did not need to say, even once, that it had been found “in a cow”, and the headline was adjusted accordingly.

On a mission: We had a nice example of slightly the wrong word in a feature about some disreputable goings on in a town in Estonia. “Russia has also been accused of stealing buoys that mark out the border,” we said, “... as well as purposefully slowing down border checks ahead of an Estonian national parade.”

An easy mistake to make, but we meant “purposely”, which means deliberately – or, in the immortal words of a certain Mrs McGregor, that they had “done it a purpose”. To do something purposefully, on the other hand, means to do it while possessed of a sense of purpose, such as one might have when absorbed in any important activity, though it seems unlikely that one could sustain this on a long-term basis; I think being purposeful probably involves frowning, at least, if not a wholesale change to one’s demeanour. Anyway, it was fixed.

Plot twist: The topic of conspiracy theories is by all accounts an intriguing one; it must be, I think, as I know two people who have studied it for years as professors of social psychology (at least, that’s what they say they’ve been doing). Even so, it’s important to recognise that conspiracy theories are not the same as conspiracies: they are a phenomenon that arises from people’s fear that so-called bad actors (a term that means parties acting with ill intent, not unpromising thespians) are conspiring in an effort to fool them.

Of course, if the theory is correct, and there is a real conspiracy at work, you have a much bigger news story on your hands. But that is comparatively rare.

“Jamie Foxx addresses health scare conspiracies in new Netflix special” was the headline on an article about a comedian wanting to “set the record straight” about a medical condition he had been dealing with. That ought to have said “conspiracy theories”, as should this sentence in a profile of a right-wing political activist: “Trump spent years spreading baseless conspiracies about the supposed dangers of mail-in voting.”

I know it’s in a journalist’s make-up to try to be concise, but we should not abbreviate a term if doing so changes its meaning.

Christmas comes but: In an article bemoaning our susceptibility to the horrors of the “special” festive experience, we mentioned a news report about children being left in tears by a “Santa ‘shambles’” at a grotto in Hampshire. “So goes one headline this week,” we said, “though in truth, it could have been written in any December of any year.” At last count, there was only one December per year, and I think that is quite enough.