Mea Culpa: metaphors for Storm Florence and storms about metaphors

Questions of style and English usage in this week’s Independent

The pictures were remarkable, but something else caught a reader’s eye about our reporting of the storm formerly known as Hurricane Florence as it approached the US seaboard. A headline said: “Category 4 Storm Florence barrels towards US coast.”

Whenever hurricanes make the news, according to Philip Nalpanis, we describe them as “barrelling”. That was certainly the case this week, as we used the term not just in that headline but in the text of the report and in another one two days later.

Nalpanis wrote: “I find this odd. A barrel will only rotate about an axis through the two ends, and this is only really practical when the axis is horizontal. A hurricane rotates around a vertical axis.”

Metaphors don’t have to be precise – a tropical storm is not really like a barrel at all – but if we use them a lot, readers are bound to start asking awkward, distracting questions.

Taste and free speech: Metaphors were in the news this week, first when Jeremy Corbyn’s defenders took offence at Chuka Umunna for calling on the Labour leader to “call off the dogs”. Then there was Boris Johnson writing: “We have wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution – and handed the detonator to Michel Barnier.”

The first was not offensive and the second was, in my view. But let free speech flourish and let everyone decide what they make of it. I thought John McDonnell, Ian Lavery and Owen Jones made fools of themselves by pretending they thought Umunna was calling Labour Party members “dogs”. Whereas Johnson made a fool of himself by using such a tasteless analogy.

As writers, however, we should try to avoid causing needless offence. I am pleased to report not a single example of the phrase “car crash interview” in The Independent this week, or any description of Brexit as “an act of self-harm”.

Slip-sliding: The mishearing of “slither” for “sliver” is now so well established that the Oxford dictionary recognises it as “British, informal”. But it is better to avoid it. This week we wrote: “Bank executives had been juicing their profits (and personal bonuses) by running down their protective capital cushions to thin slithers.”

Thanks to Beryl Wall for writing in. Slither is a verb meaning “slide” (it is a dialect form of the word), whereas a sliver is a thin slice (it comes from the same root as “cleave”).

The other thing about that sentence is the use of “juicing” to mean “adding to”. I admit I had to look it up. I thought it might mean “squeezing”, although it is clear from the rest of the sentence that we meant the opposite, a variation of “livening up”, a meaning described by the Oxford dictionary as “North American, informal”. (My expert advisers and online slang dictionaries tell me it often these days refers to using steroids and therefore means “bulking up” with the implication of cheating.)

Another usage best avoided, I think.