Mea Culpa: footing the bill for breaking Muphry’s Law

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

Cheques and balances: a slight misunderstanding involving the US president and a $5bn bill (Getty)

The hazard of criticising other people’s writing is that you are bound to fall foul of Muphry’s Law: “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” (Muphry being a humorous misspelling of Murphy, whose own law holds that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.)

That is what happened to me last week. I said, referring to a sentence accusing Donald Trump of “landing the American people with a $5bn check that somebody else was meant to pay”, that we meant “cheque”. In fact, the “check” there was a different Americanism, and we meant “bill”. Thanks to Paul Edwards and others for pointing out my mistake.

In the US the same word is used for a bit of paper recording a transaction, whether it is being used as payment or as a request for payment. All I can say is that it is a good thing that cheques will soon be a thing of the past.

Unbearable: We quoted Chris Leslie, the Labour MP who defected to the Independent Group, as saying the public were “sick and tired of this impasse, borne of politicians putting their party political interests always above the national interest”. Our style here is “born” – the convention is that it is spelt without an “e” when referring to birth, which was Leslie’s metaphor.

The word is the same, the past of bear, carry, but the Oxford dictionary records that by about 1775 the difference in spelling had become settled.

Thanks to Bernard Theobald for drawing my attention to it, and for his comment that it is a “long time since I spotted anything amiss – must be good”.

Fruity analogy: Congratulations to Dr Ajit Shah, whom we quoted in an article about a possible cure for type 1 diabetes by removing defective cells in the pancreas. “Here we show that eliminating the bad apples can save the rest, which brings a new therapeutic avenue for treating patients with T1 diabetes,” he said.

This is a rare example of the correct use of the “one bad apple” analogy. Recently, it has mostly been used by people commenting on the Labour Party’s problems with antisemitism. Defenders of Jeremy Corbyn often say that the problem has been exaggerated because it is confined to a few “bad apples”.

But the point of the analogy is that one bad apple can spoil the whole barrel, as the rot spreads. A concept that Dr Shah understands, because it seems that defective pancreatic cells spread the damage to neighbouring cells.

Dead metaphor alert: You know it is time to stop using a metaphor when its original meaning clashes with what you are trying to say. In a report of the finding by an Australian court that Cardinal George Pell was guilty of child sexual abuse, we wrote: “Pell’s trial amounted to something of a reckoning for survivors, with the brash and towering cardinal becoming the poster child for all that went wrong with the way the Catholic Church handled the scandal.”

The phrase “poster child for” has become so drained of meaning that it is used here simply to mean “symbol of”. The original meaning of a child’s face on a billboard to sell a product hardly applies to the cardinal, who represents the opposite of wholesome goodness, and is rather unfortunate in a story about children being abused.