Mea Culpa: Railways return to a golden age of not answering questions

In an editorial on Sunday we said Labour’s plan to renationalise the railways risked returning to a golden age of British Rail that never was, and concluded: “A sustainable and publicly acceptable resolution remains as evasive as ever.” Gavin Turner writes to say he thinks the word the writer was grasping for was “elusive”.

I was initially inclined to defend our anonymous leader writer, but on second thoughts Turner has a point. “Evasive” usually means the quality of not being straight, although I thought we could get away with using it as an unusual way of saying that the resolution was evading capture. The trouble is that the sentence suggests the resolution is there in front of us but is not answering questions, which makes no sense.

The Bygmalion Tautology: In a report about Nicolas Sarkozy, the French former President facing a fraud trial over his expenses in the 2012 election campaign, we called it “the so-called ‘Bygmalion Affair’”. This is something we do quite often – not referring to the Bygmalion Affair, of which I had never heard, but putting a phrase in inverted commas after “so-called”.

This seems to be a stylistic tautology. By saying “so-called” we are already waving at the reader to say, “Here is a phrase that you may not have come across before, or which is controversial.” But that is also the point of putting it in inverted commas: as if to say, “That’s not what we call it, but other people do.”

So it should be either “so-called” or in inverted commas, but not both.

Anti-syllabilisatation: We used the word “legitimatise” in a comment article the other day, which is as good a reason as any to warn against the needless lengthening of words. It has been changed to “legitimise”, which saves a bit of space and makes it easier to read. I hadn’t seen legitimatise before, but common similar examples include preventative, when preventive is better, and orientate, or reorientate, or disorientate, which can do without the extra syllable.

Badly worn genes: We wrote on Wednesday about ensuring that safety becomes “embedded in the corporate DNA”. Natural selection ought to have ensured that this metaphor died out long ago.

Full flood in a drought: Lovely journalese in a headline this week: “Rock-bottom interest rates leaving ‘savings apathy’ at crisis levels, experts warn.” That breaks the rule against the use of “expert” in a headline, but it also sets up a wonderful mixed metaphor of interest rates so low the rocks of the river bottom are exposed while levels of apathy are threatening to overflow the banks. You wouldn’t have thought that “savings apathy” – which seems to mean a rational disinclination to save when interest rates are lower than inflation – could be bothered to rise to “crisis levels”.