Mea Culpa: Going forward into the future, bearing clichés

Style glitches and grammar misfires in this week’s Independent

‘It wasn’t sustainable to carry on with the 1 per cent going forward,’ Jeremy Hunt told the Commons

It is my sorrowful duty to report six uses of “going forward” by The Independent this week. In each case, the phrase could simply be deleted.

To avoid embarrassing colleagues, allow me to illustrate by citing the seventh time we used it this week, where we were quoting Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary: “You will be aware that we recognise it wasn’t sustainable to carry on with the 1 per cent going forward and that’s why next year we’ve been given the leeway to have more flexible negotiations.”

Wherefore: In an editorial this week about the bleak outlook for the Brexit negotiations, we wrote of Boris Johnson and “the other side of the planet, whence he is so often despatched”. As Bernard Theobald wrote to point out, whence means “from where”: we meant “whither”. These are lovely old words. Long may they be preserved, preferably attached to their familiar meanings.

Who to blame? Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, wrote for us this week, and we initially put a poorly phrased headline on her article: “We all bear responsibility for wiping out ‘barbaric’ crime of modern slavery.” As Terence Carr pointed out, this implied that “we all” have already wiped it out. More than that, the word “bear” suggests responsibility for something bad. As if we might on another day carry an article defending modern slavery, arguing that slave labour is better than no work at all.

We changed Ms Rudd’s headline to: “We all have a responsibility to help wipe out ‘barbaric’ crime of modern slavery”.

Pretend Old English: We stumbled over spelling in a comment article about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged assaults on women. “If we continue to fain surprise when we hear of another famous man’s abusive behaviour …” The word “fain”, meaning glad or gladly, usually appears in the works of JRR Tolkien or other attempts to reproduce archaic English.

Thanks to John Schluter this has been changed to “feign”, to fake or to pretend to feel something, which is what we meant. The etymology is from Latin fingere, “mould, contrive”, which also gave us fiction and figment.