Mea Culpa: pooches and pet peeves

Olivia Fletcher minds our language in last week’s Independent

Ch-ch-changes: we fixed a rather insensitive headline last week comparing Shane Warne’s passing with David Bowie’s (Reuters)

Sometimes admitting we’ve made a dog’s dinner of something is the tough but right thing to do. Case in point: an article we wrote about Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Hungary. In it, we said: “One woman, holding a designer handbag, showed off her full-bred bichon frise poodle.”

A “bichon frise poodle” isn’t actually a full-bred dog, which is one whose parents are from the same breed. This makes the phrase “full-bred bichon frise poodle” an oxymoron. The dog is in fact a cross-breed. We’d have been better off omitting the word; it would have avoided the error and made the phrase more concise too.

We also could have been less ambiguous when we mentioned the designer handbag. I think it sounds like the pet could be inside the woman’s purse, like something socialite Paris Hilton would have done with her pooch in the Noughties. But it could also mean the woman was holding a designer handbag while showing off the dog.