Mea Culpa: the debris left by the Gary Lineker tweet storm

Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent, raised by John Rentoul

We suffered an outbreak of ‘licenses’, thanks to the Lineker story (Reuters)

Future generations may look back on the Tale of Gary Lineker’s Tweet with puzzlement. The storm was so intense that some debris was even washed up in this column. In an account on our sports pages of Lineker’s withdrawal from presenting Match of the Day being followed by his fellow presenters Ian Wright and Alan Shearer pulling out in solidarity, we wrote: “The levy has broken.”

We meant levee, from the French levée, meaning “raised”, referring to the embankments to protect against flooding in Louisiana.

Elsewhere we suffered an outbreak of “licenses”, thanks to the Lineker story restarting one of the dullest debates in public policy, namely over the BBC licence fee. In British English, licence is the noun and license is the verb. The only other thing you need to know is that the licence fee is the worst way to fund the BBC, apart from any of the other options.