Mea Culpa: Was the tache a little rash?

We used the dead phrase “weather conditions” in a front-page news story in the Daily Edition last week. “Australia is bracing itself for a new wave of dangerous weather conditions in the next two days,” the story concluded. After the action and drama of the first half of the sentence the clunkiness rang like a cracked bell. And how can you have a wave of conditions?

The longer version of the story inside got it right: “Australia braced itself for a fresh wave of dangerous weather in the next two days, with high winds and temperatures again set to reach 45C or more.” A better way of shortening that to fit on the front page would have been: “Australia is bracing itself for a new wave of winds and high temperatures in the next two days.”

Basis point: We used another deadening phrase in an article about Parkinson’s disease, in which we said: “Around 145,000 people are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease on an annual basis.” As Mick O’Hare pointed out, “every year” would be so much better.

And a partridge in a pear tree: Paul Park, another reader, enjoyed our report of Harry Harris, the US ambassador to South Korea, being harassed for having a moustache. He quibbled, however, with our explanation of the objections to Mr Harris’s face-furniture: “Some critics have apparently connected it to Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, during which all eight governor-generals had moustaches.”

As Paul said, the conventional plural is “governors-general”.

Short hole: We are used to a window not being literally a hole in a wall because of the transfer window in football, which I think is like an expensive game of musical chairs. But if we must use it metaphorically to mean a period of time, we should remember that it is a metaphor. In an article about 1917, Sam Mendes’s film about the First World War, we said he began filming in April, and “was locked into a Christmas Day release, giving him an unusually short window to complete a film of this scale”. How can you have a short window? This would make more sense either as a small window or a short time.