Mea Culpa: apply descaler to remove jargon and cliche

“Scale” is one of those words that can kill a sentence stone dead. In an article about the US-Mexico border, we wrote: “A partnership that began in 2015 allows officials from the US and Mexico to work side-by-side at Laredo’s ports, sharing intelligence and inspecting vehicles and commodities for apparent anomalies at an increasingly rapid scale.”

As “scale” refers to size, it is not even the right word there. I think it should be “pace”. But even “at an increasingly rapid pace” is five words for the price of two: “increasingly quickly”. Also, in passing, we did not need hyphens in “side by side” and nor did we need the word “apparent” – the checks could only be for anomalies that are apparent.

Larger and wider: The real problem with “scale”, however, is that it is often combined with “large” and “wide”. This week we reported “a number of large-scale protests have taken place” in Syria. “Large” would have been better on its own, but it hardly adds anything – which perhaps explains the temptation to add “scale” to make it seem more important. There would be nothing wrong with simply saying “a number of protests have taken place”: we were not giving the numbers, so merely by reporting them we are making the judgement that they were significant.

In a report on the Brazilian presidential election, meanwhile, we wrote: “Voters also believe the party is responsible for widespread political corruption, unveiled by large-scale investigation Operation Car Wash which has embroiled almost a third of Congress.” Again, “large-scale” adds nothing; although “large” on its own would be a bit odd. The compound adjective could simply be deleted: the embroilment of a third of Congress gives a good idea of the scale of the investigation anyway.

Wider still and wider: Finally, in an article about the infrastructure of growing cities, we wrote about “an electrical fault that triggers a wide-scale blackout”. This may be just my personal preference, but I think this is an inelegant way of saying “widespread” or “extensive”. Still, at least we avoided the business jargon of doing things “at scale”, and that clunking cliche, “on an industrial scale”, this week.

Contagion: Another journalistic way of saying “there is a lot of it about” is “has reached epidemic proportions”. This week’s thing that wasn’t a disease that had “reached epidemic proportions” was “financial fear”. It turns out 80 per cent of us say we wake up at night because of worries about money. I suppose anyone would describe a disease that afflicted four-fifths of a population as an epidemic, but as there is no proportion of a population that is defined as an epidemic, the hackneyed phrase doesn’t add anything.

Inseparable pair: We used the word “inextricably” twice this week. Guess which word it was linked with each time? In a comment article about Italy’s budget crisis we said: “The Italian banks and treasury are like two drunken giants propping each other up, inextricably linked by mutual weakness.” And in another, about violent language in politics, we said: “The way in which we talk about members of a particular group is inextricably linked to their social position and the way in which we treat them.” It’s almost as if “inextricably” and “linked” are inextricably linked.