Mea Culpa: a sparkling scolding amid continuing grumbles

With your regular columnist taking a break this week, I’ve stepped out from the safety of the production desk to bring you a sub’s-eye view of questionable uses of language and style across our pages.

Yesterday was World Environment Day, and the headline of a piece in the Daily Edition declared that there may still be hope for our ravaged ecosystems. I have very little hope, however, that our readers made it to the end of one uncommonly long sentence with a better understanding of the matters it raised. Over the course of 130 words laden with jargon, and culminating in a spectacular mixed metaphor, we find that “a confluence of seemingly unconnected but in fact synergistic developments” has “raised the stakes and led fence-sitting nations to step up to the plate in the home stretch” leading to the COP26 conference. Mixed-metaphor watching is a favourite pastime of sub-editors and a quadruple mash-up really is one for the books.

The fact that it was written by a distinguished scholar does not mean we shouldn’t have been bold during the editing process. If we had applied the Orwellian principles of never using long words when shorter ones will do, avoiding metaphors we’re used to seeing in print and asking ourselves, “Can we make this shorter?”, the end result would have been clearer, more concise and as a result harder-hitting.

Speculate on coruscate: In a forthright comment piece about the government’s treatment of disabled people, we originally published the following: “Read the UN report coruscating the government for trampling on the rights of its disabled citizens if you think I’m exaggerating.” To coruscate means to flash or sparkle, and glittering these charges are not. At a push, coruscating can be used as an adjective to mean scathing or critical – “the UN’s coruscating attack” might have passed. But we changed it to excoriating, another deliciously onomatopoeic word and the one which is more suitable in this context. Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for pointing it out.

Above and behind: In an editorial last week, we talked about “forces way behind human control” that could delay the world’s economic recovery from Covid-19. I’ll gloss over “behind”, mentioning only that this is not what Orwell meant by avoiding phrases we’ve seen before. It’s “way” that caused offence: the forces are either beyond human control or they’re not. Thankfully it was within human control to give it the chop.

Amid wars: You’ve seen it here before and you’ll probably see it again. Part of our remit is to hold the fort against journalese and its even less savoury cousin, headlinese. “Amid”, often used as a shortcut for “during” or “because of”, appears to have stayed out of headlines in the Daily Edition but it still peppers our website. Our use of it for an article about tennis – “Yana Sizikova arrested at French Open amid alleged match-fixing investigation” – not only diluted the headline’s impact but also led to a situation where it looked as if it was the investigation that was alleged. “Yana Sizikova arrested at French Open for alleged match-fixing” would have been fine.

“Over” is another piece of headline shorthand sometimes used interchangeably with amid, with a similarly weakening effect. We narrowly avoided the front-page headline “Hancock denies lying over care homes”, opting for the more direct and much better “Hancock denies lying about care homes”, thus sparing our readers the mental image of the health secretary sprawling painfully over old folks’ accommodation.