Mea Culpa: the use of the phrase ‘ramp up’ has ramped up exponentially

Several outbreaks of vogue words and phrases have followed the coronavirus pandemic. One that is extremely infectious is “ramp up”. The centre of this infection (not the “epicentre”, obviously) has been traced to in or around Whitehall or Downing Street, as politicians, scientists and officials struggle to increase the number of Covid-19 tests.

The infection jumped the species barrier to journalists a few weeks ago and last week there were 17 cases in The Independent. Admittedly in about half of them, we were quoting other people, but the other half occurred in our own reporting.

It is a poor metaphor, because increasing the number of tests that can be carried out is not like building a slope to allow vehicles or blocks of pyramid stone to get up to a higher level. I suppose verbing the word “ramp” sounded good in business jargon, possibly because it evokes a mental image of a car hitting a ramp to jump over something.

But in The Independent’s pages it needs to be quarantined ruthlessly until the rate of infection falls below one and it is safe for us to relax our guard.

Amidwatch: The latest instalment of another monitoring exercise detected six headlines in The Independent last week with “amid” in them. “Amid” is a fine word, and can be useful in headlines to link two things without asserting cause and effect, because it is unspecific and, above all, short.

Short as it is, though, every time we used it last week we could have replaced it with the word “in”, which is even shorter. We said: “Asylum seekers ‘at risk of destitution’ amid lockdown” and “Women in NI ‘able to have early abortions’ amid lockdown”. In both cases, “in lockdown” would have been better.

We also had “Food banks struggling to keep doors open amid crisis”, where the same applies.

Elsewhere we had the headline: “Trump suspends WHO funding amid virus row”. This looked like an attempt to fudge the reason for the president’s suspension of US funding for the World Health Organisation, but as Donald Trump said it was because it had covered up the coronavirus outbreak, this seems too tentative.

Then we had this on the sports pages: “Arsenal vow not to furlough staff amid ‘productive’ talks with players over pay cuts.” I think “in” would have been fine there too, although strictly the club may not have made the promise in the talks, in which case “during” would have been just as good.

Champagne supernova: In last week’s column, I mentioned Richard Thomas, who took us to task for saying “twice as much carbon than previously thought”, instead of “twice as much as”. Last week he was back to draw attention to this headline: “Seeing the light: supernova twice as energetic or bright than any ever recorded.”

That has been changed to “as any ever recorded”, and we hope Mr Thomas, who has been “with the Indy since its outset”, and the other readers who pointed it out, continue to stay with us.