Mea Culpa: It’s a fallacy to say the sun has got his hat on

Questions of style and language in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

Lord Deben (left) with former Commons speaker John Bercow. Only one of them is an ex-Conservative (PA)

In an editorial about the implications for the government’s target of net zero carbon of the appointment of Jacob Rees-Mogg as business secretary, we said: “He has cast doubt on anthropomorphic climate change...” We meant “anthropogenic”, as more than one reader wrote to let us know.

“Anthropomorphic” means treating things such as animals as if they were humans. We did not mean that the climate is like a person – that is a literary fancy known as the pathetic fallacy. “Anthropogenic”, on the other hand, means that something has been generated by humans.

The lesson of this confusion is not that we should use the right word, although that would obviously be preferable, but that we should not use long, technical and obscure words that are similar to other long, technical and obscure words. I can see why we wouldn’t want to say “man-made climate change”, but we could have said it in a simpler way, such as: “He has expressed doubts that human activity is changing the climate.”