Mea Culpa: caught on the hop

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

Shock treatment: one of our writers nearly killed off Machine Gun Kelly in a review (AFP via Getty)

We carried a fine headline last weekend: “‘Most wanted’ one-legged crime boss arrested in Thailand after years on the run.” That is a good equal-opportunity use of the idiomatic phrase “on the run”; there is no reason why it shouldn’t apply to someone who is differently abled. And only a pedant would point out that the phrase “most wanted” implies a league table of one-legged crime bosses, some of whom are more urgently sought by the authorities than others.

Hair-raising performance: In a review of Machine Gun Kelly – he is an American rapper noted for his “genre duality across alternative rock and hip-hop”, m’lud – we wrote: “Fans noticed that at one point during the concert, the 32-year-old’s hair stuck straight up, leading many to speculate that he had been electrocuted.” As he was still alive at the end of the concert, Iain Boyd suggested that this was the wrong word to use.

“Electrocute” was invented at about the same time as the electric chair, in the late 19th century, by merging “electro” and “execute”, although modern dictionaries note that it can be used to mean injure, as well as kill, by electric shock. Even so, as MGK appeared unharmed, we should have said that the speculation was that he had had an electric shock. There ought to be a word in English that means “had an electric shock”, but there isn’t.