Mea Culpa: a grammar glitch in George Michael’s art collection

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

John Rentoul
Friday 22 March 2019 17:55 GMT
Comments
Damien Hirst’s ‘Beautiful Beautiful George Michael Love Painting’ – not part of the late singer’s recently auctioned collection
Damien Hirst’s ‘Beautiful Beautiful George Michael Love Painting’ – not part of the late singer’s recently auctioned collection

All praise to whoever wrote the headline on our report of an auction: “I knew you were bidding: George Michael’s art collection fetches £11.3m”. Marvellous.

However, Paul Eustice wrote to point out a common crime against The Independent’s style in the story itself. We wrote: “The collection, comprised of more than 150 lots ...”. As he said, comprised means consisted of, so the convention is that it is not followed by “of”. We should have said, “The collection comprised more than 150 lots …” or, “The collection, consisting of more than 150 lots …”

The simple things you see are all complicated: A number of readers wrote to draw my attention to another common departure from convention in an article about Tim Martin, the Brexit-supporting boss of Wetherspoon, who blamed Remainers for a fall in profits.

Perhaps we were enjoying the unintended comedy too much to attend to details as we reported: “Wheat beer and alcohol-free beer from Germany, which are currently stocked by the chain, will be substituted for UK-brewed products.”

As Terence Carr and others pointed out, the conventional usage is “substituted with”. When you are substituting, you are talking about the thing you end up with, rather than the thing that has been replaced. When the Who sang “substitute your lies for fact”, they ended up with the lies.

Ease tensions: We reported that Li Keqiang, the Chinese prime minister, said the government was not telling Chinese tech companies to spy abroad, “in an effort to defuse tensions with Washington and Europe”. I wonder about this phrase. To defuse a bomb means to take the fuse out, to make it safe. But that is not really what you do with “tensions”, which you try to reduce. The reason the phrase is so popular may be because it sounds like “diffuse”, which means spread out to make less concentrated, which is more like what Keqiang was trying to do.

Over the cliff: The Brexit imbroglio continues to generate ugly phrases that make it harder for readers. We have had problems with the idea of a no-deal Brexit, a negative formulation sometimes shortened to “no deal” as a noun. Then people talk about ruling out a no-deal Brexit, which becomes a double negative: not leaving the EU without a deal.

Generally, I hope we have succeeded in making it reasonably clear what we mean. But yesterday we combined “no-deal” as an adjective with that common Brexit metaphor, the cliff edge, in a subheadline on the front of our Daily Edition: “EU leaders push back no-deal cliff edge by two weeks.”

I think that is too complicated, leaving aside the quibble that cliff edges cannot be moved forwards, only eroded backwards. Something simpler such as “push back deadline for no-deal Brexit by two weeks” might have been easier to understand.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in