Mea Culpa: Resign! Enough of this stale and mistaken chess metaphor

A headline in the Independent Daily Edition on Tuesday said: “Trump and Ryan stalemated ahead of peace talks.” I think the word we wanted was “standoff”, which starts with the same three letters, as in “Trump and Ryan in standoff”.

I am all for turning nouns into verbs if they are short, vivid and clear, but “stalemated” is horrible.

First, turning the ending “-mate” into a verb has completely the wrong connotation. I won’t tell you what ghastly image was conjured up of Donald Trump and Paul Ryan in my unsophisticated mind.

In any case, stalemate is the wrong word. You don’t have to know much about chess to know that a stalemate is a draw, and that it is the end of the game. It jars, therefore, to use it to mean a temporary impasse, which might be “broken” and after which the contest might resume.

That was explicitly the sense in which we used the word: the story was that Trump and Ryan were expected to meet two days later to try to resolve their differences.

Succession clue: We published a notable one-sentence paragraph in our report on Sunday of the growing power of Mohammed bin Salman, Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. We said that he had “replaced 20-year veteran oil minister Ali al-Naimi with someone who he directly controls the actions of – Khalid al-Falih, chairman of the state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco”.

I suspect many readers find the phrase “20-year veteran” confusing. It is a common form in American reporting, but I read it as “20-year-old veteran”. There is nothing wrong with the journalese “veteran” to mean “long-serving”, but if that is what we mean, let us just say it.

Then we come to al-Naimi’s replacement: “someone who he directly controls the actions of.” What a mess. Let’s see how the sentence could be rewritten. The Deputy Crown Prince “replaced long-serving oil minister Ali al-Naimi with someone he can rely on to carry out his wishes”. It requires only a moment’s thought.

Droning on: We provoked the Luddites on Wednesday by reporting a forecast that drones were going to replace humans in all kinds of jobs: “The tiny airborne vessels will soon clean windows on skyscrapers, verify insurance claims and spray pesticide on crops.”

The second example brought me up short. I had a vision of a four-rotored toy hovering over some paperwork.

I think we meant that the “tiny airborne vessels”, an elegant variation deployed to avoid repeating “drones”, would be used to do such things as to check fire damage in inaccessible parts of buildings. We could have said that.

Shades of meaning: A headline on Friday said: “Fifty Shades of Grey readers more likely to uphold sexist attitudes.” Apart from telling me something that I could have guessed without the assistance of a study by the Ohio State and Michigan State Universities, the word “uphold” was a poor choice.

Upholding is something a superior court does when it confirms a decision of a lower one, or it means to maintain a tradition or practice. No doubt the beliefs and behaviour of many Fifty Shades of Grey readers do perpetuate sexism, but we simply meant that they “hold” sexist attitudes.