Mea Culpa: appealing music at Glastonbury

In my campaign against “amid”, a word often used lazily to bolt two sections of a headline together, I advocate better and more precise words to connect two parts of a sentence, such as “despite”, “because of” and “while”. 

We managed to avoid “amid” in this headline on Wednesday but chose the wrong joining word in its place: “Boots to shut 300 stores across UK despite surge in online shoppers.” That makes it seem as if the increase in Boots’ sales through its website should help to keep its shops open, whereas the company is quite logically closing shops as their sales fall. That online sales are “surging” is good news for the company as a whole but it is no reason to keep shops open that are losing money. Here we needed an “as” in something like this: “Boots to shut 300 stores across UK as shoppers switch to buying online.”

Embittered: In a report on Formula One we wrote: “From a simple interest point of view, Reynolds and McElhenney have a huge fanbase worldwide that the Wrexham project has only exacerbated.” Thanks to Roger Thetford for pointing out we meant something like increased, enhanced or excited. “Exacerbate” means to make bitter, from the Latin exacerbare, related to acerbic (the “ex–” prefix in this case means “making”).  

High ball: In an article about class bias in cricket we said that the sport “is – or should be – for everyone, and doesn’t belong to any particular strata in society”. As Philip Nalpanis said, this should strictly be “stratum”, the singular, but that, like “datum” as the singular of “data”, would be so unfamiliar to so many people that we should have found another word. We were presumably trying to avoid repeating “class”, so perhaps something a bit mushy such as “social group” would have to do. 

Appeal for attention: In a review of Glastonbury, we said: “It would be a worthy set closer. Turner and Jamie Cook peel into warring guitar solos in a finale that could pass for Sunday-night headliner Elton John.” As Henry Peacock pointed out, we probably meant “peal”, as in bells.

I did not know that “peal” is probably a shortened form of “appeal” because a bell “appeals” to people to come to church. The word then came to mean “loud ringing of bells” and later referred to other successions of loud sounds, such as thunder, cannon, laughter – and guitars.

Down-roping: In an article about spies and diplomats, we wrote: “Swedish media described elite police rappelling from two Black Hawk helicopters to arrest a couple that had allegedly spied for Russia.” In British English the usual word is “abseiling”, although it comes from German (literally down-roping). For no obvious reason, American English prefers the French mountaineering term “rappelling”, which means recalling, in the sense of being recalled to the bottom of the mountain.

Earth-shattering: I have commented before on borrowing the word “epicentre” from its geological use as a fancy way of saying “centre” or “the very centre”, but we managed to use it wrongly in a report of an earthquake. We said: “The British Geological Survey confirmed the tremor, which struck at 8.21pm and had an epicentre 4.5 miles below the village of Tean, between Stoke-on-Trent and Uttoxeter.”

As Iain Brodie said, we can be reasonably confident that the British Geological Survey would have used “epicentre” correctly as the location on the surface of the earth directly above the focus of the earthquake.