Mea Culpa: Chair and chair alike

We seem to have forgotten, over the past week or two, that The Independent has a long-standing policy of doing without gendered job titles where possible. It is difficult in some cases – calling someone a businessperson, for instance, feels clumsy and awkward – but when there is a simple solution to the problem, there is no excuse. So it pains me to report that we have used the word “chairman” 242 times in the past seven days, at time of writing.

Our style has been “chair” for as long as I can remember, and that shouldn’t change just because someone important in politics has had to stand down... or sit down, perhaps. I’m not sure we’re getting much better at using “spokesperson”, either, with 155 mentions of a “spokesman” over the same seven days. I suspect it is a losing battle.

Parallel universe: From chairs to thrones, I suppose, and “An extraordinary piece of gold jewellery – linked to the 16th-century English king Henry VIII – has been discovered by a metal detectorist in a field in the English Midlands” was our excitable opening to an article about an archaeological find, as we made sure to clarify which Henry VIII we meant – and, indeed, which Midlands.

There is, as far as my colleagues and I are aware, no alternative Henry VIII that we could have been referring to, though on further inquiry it appears that there is another Midlands, and it is in South Carolina (that’s the American South Carolina, in case anyone was wondering). We decided that the potential for confusion was small, however, and gently removed the well-intended but extraneous information.

Error of commission: A fun game of which our reporters never seem to tire is inventing parliamentary committees. The committee on standards on public life was one we came up with last week; another was the Commons select committee on privileges. Those of you who take an interest will know that these should have been the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the committee of privileges, though admittedly the profusion of such committees, with their concomitantly confusing titles, doesn’t make it easy. To add to the mayhem, we don’t cap up the names of parliamentary ones.

For the record, there is a Commons committee on standards, and a separate body, the committee of privileges. The Committee on Standards in Public Life is a different sort of committee altogether, which is not particularly helpful of it. Still, it’s the small things that count, and we owe it to our readers to be “across” these things, as people say in business-speak.

Over and above: Talking of prepositions, we do seem susceptible to using whichever is closest to hand in any given context, rather than giving the matter due thought. Our use of “over”, in particular, seems to have proliferated recently, as seen in an article last week about trust in the police, which described “an avalanche of scandals over misogyny and sexual violence”. It was fine, really, but it would have been so much better if we had gone for “involving” instead.

Obviously, getting the facts right is the most important part of our reporting, but it helps the reader stay interested, I think, if we make use of as broad a vocabulary as possible. It also stops the sub-editors from falling asleep on the job. [Perish the thought – Ed.]

Now or never: “Sir Keir Starmer’s party has urged the government to publish details on whether it has considered scrapping non-dom tax status by the end of February,” we wrote in a report about politics. As an aside, that “on” is crying out to be rescued and replaced with an “of”. More important, as reader John Harrison was keen to point out, was the obvious ambiguity in the sentence, which implied that the question was whether the tax status would be scrapped “by the end of February”.

As he suggested, we could have recast it to avoid this: “Sir Keir Starmer’s party has urged the government to publish before the end of February details of whether it has considered scrapping non-dom tax status.” There. That wasn’t so difficult.

As you like it: “Last year, Angela Rayner was the highest-profile politician to label criticisms against her as both ‘classist’ and ‘sexist’,” we said in an opinion piece about discrimination. The “as” there is unnecessary: you label something a thing, not as a thing. We make this mistake a lot; people frequently brand an action as something or other, or appoint a person as chief of staff, or chancellor, or cake-haver-and-eater-at-large, in the pages of our paper. I think it should be declared as illegal.

Caption credit: Mick O’Hare wrote in praise of a picture caption on an article about Rod Stewart stepping in to assist people waiting for scans on the NHS. “We are ailing”, it read. Perfect.