Mea Culpa: Inelegant variation in ancient books

In a travel feature about Portugal on Monday we said that the walls of the Joanina Library in Coimbra (above) “are still lined with frescoes, gilded carvings and about 60,000 academic tomes”.

The place sounds lovely, but there is no need to resort to the journalese “tomes” to avoid repeating the word “books”. The reader has a greater toleration for the repetition of simple words than we often think.

Elegant variation is wonderful if it is actually elegant, but “tomes” is not.

Rolling news: Our excellent guide to travel companies for customers with mobility issues on Wednesday praised Limitless Travel, which is “currently rolling out access-focused reviews of attractions and hotels across the UK”. Ouch. We could have said that it is reviewing (the present tense is what “currently” means) how accessible attractions and hotels are to people with mobility needs.

Non-imperial: We often use “metric” on our business pages to mean a measure of something, or an indicator. We reported on Telefonica on Tuesday: “The company expects free cash flow and operating income before depreciation and amortisation, or Oibda, to be higher in 2017 than in 2016, Mr Pallete said, without forecasting how much either metric would be.”

We could have used “figure”, or simply cut it out: “... how much either would be” would have been fine. The trouble with metric is not just that it is jargon, but that it is more often used as an adjective referring to the metric system, so the reader has to pause for a millisecond to check the meaning.

Dead words: Another word we use too often is “implement”, a deadening word that can always be replaced by something else. On Monday we said that David Lammy, the Labour MP, “believes Parliament should have a say on whether Brexit is implemented”.

We have to accept that the word Brexit is a short and useful addition to the language, but it means “Britain’s exit from the EU”. The legislation giving effect to it could be implemented, I suppose, but “leaving the EU” is not something you “implement”, you just do it.

As so often, simply leaving out unnecessary words improves the sentence. We could have said that Lammy “believes Parliament should have a say on Brexit”.

Milestone, landmark or benchmark? We reported on Saturday on the confusion about Frank Lampard’s game for New York City against DC United, where he was presented with a shirt and a ring to commemorate his scoring 300 goals in his career. It turned out that someone had miscounted, and he had scored only 299 goals at that point.

We described the number 300 as a milestone to be “secured”, a landmark to be “reached” and a benchmark to be “overtaken”. They are all fine as metaphors, although I can’t see a milestone without thinking of my friend Allan Christensen’s definition of it as “like a gallstone, only bigger and more painful”.

A landmark is a reasonable analogy for a notable achievement, and a benchmark was originally a horizontal line in stone as a reference point for surveying.

Luckily, Lampard scored twice in the game, so by the time it ended all the geography metaphors had not been mixed in vain.