#233

The Times, October 16, 2017

This story was in the i newspaper on Saturday, and in the previous post (232) I pointed out the appearance in it of both ‘gasses’ (incorrect) and ‘gases’ (correct). Amazingly, the same pair of words come up in this one. Is there some telepathic process at work? Or is someone doing shifts on both papers who thinks it is acceptable to spell a word two ways in one story? I’d love to know.

#232

All the following cuttings are from the i newspaper, October 14, 2017

There may be a few i readers who do not watch Doctor Foster, so it is necessary to tell them that the woman in the picture is Suranne Jones, who plays the title role. You can’t leave them to guess.

This heading reads as if the judge is talking to his own daughter. A better version would be

Your mother loved you, judge tells girl, 12

Reporters are quite capable of spelling a word two different ways within two paragraphs, but a sub should spot this. For the record, I researched the correct use of gases/gasses for Style Matters. There is a lot of conflicting advice, but I settled on ‘gases’ as a plural of the noun ‘gas’ (the word needed here) and ‘gasses’ as the present tense of the verb ‘to gas’. I would use ‘tenth’ rather than ’10th’, in keeping with using words for numbers one to ten, and figures thereafter.

Careless and ignorant. ‘It’s’ is a short form of ‘it is’, while the possessive of ‘it’ is ‘its’.

‘Shared by’?! How about ‘from’? Or ‘In a statement, Hackney Empire said’ or, best of all, ‘Hackney Empire said’? Anything but ‘shared by’.

So why is it an issue about non-Asian singers? Because the play is set in an Asian restaurant and follows the story of a Chinese kitchen worker. It would be helpful for the reader to be told this.

Many Americanisms enrich the language, but the ghastly ‘snuck’ is not one of them. We would say ‘sneaked’, or I would have used ‘scraped’.

As for the panel (20 words), ‘The Orkney Islands are made up of 70 islands’ is very poor, not to mention the repetition of ‘inhabited’. This is how I would do it:

Orkney comprises 70 islands, 20 of them inhabited. They were first occupied by Mesolithic tribes at least 8,500 years ago. (20 words)

So did they tame the wind? No, they did more tests and concluded it was safe after all.

The heading is pretty bad. Flights are not ‘received’, and there should be some indication that it is the first. I would suggest

Maiden flight for
St Helena airport

 

 

#231

The Times, October 13, 2017

Corny doesn’t begin to cover this headline. ‘Purrfect’ would have been old-fashioned in the 1950s. Other joke words which should never appear include pooch/mutt/moggy, boffin, toff, cad and jape. While on the topic of hoary rubbish, ‘egg’ or ‘eggs’ occasionally appears as a replacement prefix for ‘ex’, such as ‘eggcellent’ or ‘eggstraordinary’. There is not one variation that has not been used thousands of times, and they are all very tiresome.

#230

The Times, October 13, 2017

‘Effectively’ and ‘in effect’ do not mean the same thing. ‘Effectively’ means the intended outcome was achieved, as in ‘Putting down poison effectively cleared the island of rats’, while ‘in effect’ means that something happened even though it might not have been intended, as in ‘Putting down poison in effect turned the island into a wildlife desert’. Most of the time ‘effectively’, if correctly used, would be redundant (as in my example above), while ‘in effect’ is nearly always the one that is required, as here. It should say either ‘ . . . are in effect to be given an amnesty’ or ‘ . . . are to be given an amnesty in effect’.

#225

 

All these cuttings are from pp 6-7 of the i newspaper, September 23, 2017

These figures appeared in different stories in the i’s spread on the withdrawal of Uber’s London licence. (There were also two stories giving varying figures for the number who had signed a protest petition, but one cutting disappeared into my printer and refused to come out.) It is always a problem when you have several stories on the same topic, but there are ways to reduce the chance of conflicting figures and facts. The best way is to have one person subbing all the stories in the hope that he or she will spot the clashes. If there is not time for this, and several subs need to be working at once, someone should be given the task of reading all the subbed copy. It can also be a good idea to designate one story as the carrier of figures, and every other one should avoid them if possible.

And finally: I don’t often use literals, or typos as they seem to be called these days, but this one from the same spread seemed appropriate.

 

 

#224

(135 words) I simply cannot understand how someone could read the words ‘one of the world’s largest birds’ without thinking, ‘Hmm, I wonder how big that is?’ or ‘its population plummeted in the 20th century’ without asking, ‘How low did it go?’ A quick look on Google reveals a most dramatic tale, which is not even hinted at in this story. In addition, the phrase in the intro ‘went nearly extinct’ is not recognisable as English, the word condor appears eight times, the picture is no more than a coloured blob, and the heading is a short version of the intro.

Here is the story the i could not be bothered to tell you:

Threatened condor soars above the US again

Three decades after it reached the brink of extinction, the mighty California condor is making a comeback.

The largest flying bird in America, with a wingspan of nine and a half feet (nearly three metres), once patrolled the skies from Mexico to British Columbia, but its population plummeted in the 20th century as a result of hunting, habitat destruction and lead poisoning from shot which killed the carrion on which it feeds.

By 1987 there were only 22 left, and all were taken into captivity to start a breeding programme. There are now roughly 450, about 270 of which live wild in California, Arizona, Utah and Mexico. There are plans to release more on the California-Oregon border.

The success of the programme is attributed partly to reduced use of lead shot near condor feeding grounds. (130 words)

I am baffled by many things: atoms, for example, and moments of force. The greatest mystery, however, is what makes someone with zero curiosity and zero feeling for words say, ‘Yes! Journalism is the job for me!’