Mea Culpa: Keeping the peace

Susanna Richards chases her own tail in last week’s Independent

Suddenly they were everywhere (Getty/iStock)

As was bound to happen when the incumbent writer of this column took a break from his campaign against the improper use of “amid”, our deployment of this tiny yet seemingly apocalypse-proof word has proliferated once again. The cat is away, as the saying goes, and though I am not he, I am yet not averse to obliterating the odd mouse in his absence.

Reader Paul Edwards wrote to alert us to the presence of one in an article about a television celebrity: “TV presenter and broadcaster Jonnie Irwin has shared a health update amid his terminal cancer diagnosis,” we wrote. There was absolutely no need for it in this context; we could simply have said “about”, or “after”. At time of writing, we have used the word 347 times in the past week, which is almost enough to fill a whole article with nothing but amids. At least that would make them easier to find and destroy.

Wrong kind of passenger: It seemed as though we were misattributing blame for the problems afflicting Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport when we reported that it had declared 2022 “a record year in terms of disappointing customers and financial losses”. Obviously, we were referring to the poor experience of those using the busy international hub, but the image of its owners being terribly excited to welcome interesting visitors, only to find that they were actually just a lot of random people with suitcases, is one I will treasure.