Mea Culpa: workers of the word, unite

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

Boris Johnson, shining, or not shining according to taste, on the UN stage (Reuters)

On rare occasions, a mistake can make a sentence better. We said in an editorial about Boris Johnson’s trip to the US: “In trouble at home, he has the chance to shine on the word stage.” When John Harrison wrote to me about it, I thought at first that he was suggesting the phrase “trouble at home” held an impertinent double meaning.

My brain saw what it expected to see, and failed to see the missing “l” in “world”. We corrected it, but our prime minister is very much the kind of politician who tries to get out of trouble by shining on the “word stage”. He sought to distract attention from unhelpful domestic news stories by chiding Emmanuel Macron in Franglais and invoking Kermit the Frog in his lecture to the UN about the virtues of being green. If that is the kind of silliness you like, and there are a lot of people in Britain who like their prime minister, you will have thought that he shone on the word stage.

Champagne or ice cream? In our report of the eruption of the volcano on La Palma, one of the Canary Islands, we said “about 1,000 residents formed a convoy out of the village before the red-hot magnum snaked towards their homes”. We meant magma, which is molten rock, but the usual term is lava, once the magma erupts onto the surface.