Mea Culpa: Questions to which the answer is, ‘You tell me’

I have written a whole book about headlines in the form of Questions To Which The Answer Is No, but there are other headlines posed as questions that are equally deserving of gentle mockery. Generally, this kind of article should either tell the reader the answer to a question, or at least teasingly suggest that the answer might not be the one the reader is expecting.

Otherwise the reader might just think, to take some recent examples, “I don’t know, why is there hostility to a US exit from Syria? How did the deadly Indonesia tsunami creep past early warning systems? Why does everyone think Muslims hate Christmas?”

Get thee to a monastery: We used the phrase “prior to” nine times this week, not counting a few occasions when we were quoting someone.

One of our correspondents, for example, wrote of enjoying an excellent lunch with the Chinese ambassador “prior to embarking on a press trip to the People’s Republic”. A caption described a photo of a Palestinian horseman on a Gaza beach “prior to new year’s celebrations”. And in a report of new rules for Australian tennis, we said play could be suspended if extreme heat was recorded “prior to or during the first two sets of the match”.

I think “prior to” is ugly, prissy and too long. Apart from that, there is nothing wrong with it. But “before” is always, always better.

Lunacy: The dark side of the moon came up a few times this week, because the Chinese landed a craft on the side we can’t see from Earth. As Andrew Ruddle pointed out, it is not permanently dark, although it does permanently face away from us. It gets as much sunlight as the other side. In later reports, we put “dark side” in quotation marks at least.

Time running out: Another reader, Gavin Turner, wrote to ask about the expression “running down the clock”, which is suddenly common among politicians and commentators talking about Brexit. Was it invented by Jo Johnson, the pro-referendum former minister, he wanted to know.

I don’t think so. I believe it comes from American football, in which a tactic is to let the game clock run down to 3-5 seconds and to call a timeout, which stops the clock. You then kick for goal, leaving your opponent no time when the clock restarts.

It should be covered by the blanket ban on the use of American sporting metaphors in British English – such as ballpark figures, stepping up to the plate and a Hail Mary pass. But Jeremy Corbyn used it this week to condemn Theresa May for trying to suggest parliament had to vote for her withdrawal agreement because there is no time to negotiate anything else.

He should know that the only acceptable Brexit-related US sports metaphor is the backstop, because that’s from rounders as well as baseball.

Shaving: We quoted a spokesperson for the Refugee Council this week on conditions for refugees in France, talking about “migrant camps being razed from the ground”. Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for spotting it.

To raze – that is, to destroy (a building or settlement) utterly – sounds the same as another word, raise, meaning almost the opposite. Raze comes from radere, Latin for scrape, the same root as razor, and the normal usage is that buildings are razed to the ground. Here it sounds as if there is confusion with the idea of tents being raised from the ground and taken away.