Mea Culpa: a raft of dead wood phrases floats downriver

Style, usage and cliches in this week’s Independent

Whitewater rafting in Alaska. Photo: Keith Parker (Creative Commons)

Guy Keleny, who started this column 18 years ago, once inveighed against a raft of phrases such as “a raft of” – “those terms ending in ‘of’ that amount to little more than preliminary throat-clearing”.

The raft metaphor is a special feature of the business pages. In the past week we have written: “a raft of properties have come on to the market”; “Stobart has announced a raft of board appointments”; and IMF loans to Greece came with tough conditions, including “a raft of reforms aimed at improving tax collection”.

In each case I think “several” would have worked fine, and would have averted the curious mental images of buildings, tied together, being launched on to a river; or of people in business suits paddling into the boardroom; or of a boatful of tax inspectors negotiating whitewater rapids.

Levelling down: Guy listed many other examples of this kind of dead wood. As he pointed out, “level of” can almost always be deleted. This week we wrote about a business professor “pointing out the level of success Tesla has had up to this point under Musk”. All we needed was “the success Tesla has had”.

Free range: Next, “a range of”. This, too, can usually be omitted with benefit. This week we wrote that exhaust gases “have been linked with a range of health problems”. That would be better as just “with health problems”. We said Team Sky “will face competition from a varied range of threats”. There we could have just said “many”, or “several” again – the variety of the threats was made clear by listing the four competitors and their different strengths.

Then there was this, which just goes to show how these phrases can become too much of a habit. In an article about how to avoid rogue websites that offer visas, we warned against “a range of private companies based in a wide range of countries”, which pay search engines to rank them more highly than official government sites. That could have been: “many private companies based all over the world...”

Guy also listed “a package of”, “a basket of” and, slightly different, “the introduction of”. This week we reported that “the government has considered the introduction of a latte levy – a 25p tax on all takeaway coffee cups”. We could have said it has considered “imposing” a latte levy, or just that it has considered a latte levy.

How many hallmarks? One phrase that wasn’t on Guy’s list, but which I thought could have been, is “all the hallmarks of”. We had that last weekend in our assessment of N’Golo Kanté’s new position at Chelsea, which “had all the hallmarks of something that is going to improve this team”. I don’t know why it is so often “all” the hallmarks, rather than just “the hallmarks of”, but maybe it isn’t so bad, come to think of it, as long as the writer knows that the term “hallmark” is derived from Goldsmiths’ Hall in London, where gold and silver were stamped to certify their standard of purity.