11 February 2012 12:00 AM
"Chaos on roads and railways to continue today, warn forecasters." That headline appeared over a news story on Monday. It happens every winter: severe weather is greeted by the absurdly overdramatic word "chaos". Of course, "chaos" is a short word, and as such very difficult to keep out of headlines.
04 February 2012 12:00 AM
In a time when nobody is ever held personally responsible for anything, and all we have to do after any disaster is "make sure that the lessons are learnt", the word "scapegoat" has undergone a change.
28 January 2012 12:00 AM
Bad mark: "Monday marked the six-month anniversary of Winehouse's death," said a news story on Thursday.
22 January 2012 12:00 AM
On 10 April last year in an article headlined “Royals believe Eugenie and Beatrice targeted” we reported suspicions held by Prince Andrew that his daughters' phones may have been hacked. Our article implied that hacking may have been carried out by The Sun newspaper. The Sun has asked us to point out that there is no evidence whatsoever any such hacking was carried out by the title or on behalf of the title. We are happy to make the position clear.
21 January 2012 12:00 AM
The other day somebody said "dichotomy" and I was transported back half a century. You hardly ever hear that word nowadays, but back in the Sixties everything seemed to be a dichotomy. Words go in and out of fashion like anything else.
19 January 2012 12:00 AM
Because of a problem with our wires service, a report published yesterday attributed a statement that bankers, bonuses are "unacceptable" to the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, rather than to Michael Cohrs, who was also appearing before MPs as a member of the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee.
14 January 2012 12:00 AM
Several times this week we used "lengthy" as a lengthy version of "long".
07 January 2012 12:00 AM
Dashed long: On Monday we inflicted a 49-word sentence on readers in our report that Gordon Brown's emails were "hacked" when he was Chancellor.
31 December 2011 12:00 AM
Those of us who remember the "anti-Vietnam" demonstrations were carried back to the 1960s by the following opening of a news story on Wednesday: "Poor Tony.
24 December 2011 12:00 AM
On Thursday 22 December, we reported that the Daily Express reporter Padraig Flanagan, had told the Leveson Inquiry he was not surprised when Kate and Gerry McCann took legal action against the newspaper because the then editor, Peter Hill, was not interested in any other story.
24 December 2011 12:00 AM
The word "but" is sometimes used in the first paragraph of a news report to suggest a tension that is not there. We had one on Monday.
17 December 2011 12:00 AM
On Friday, we reported that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) had ruled that hearsay evidence could continue to be heard in British courts. The ECHR is an organ of the Council of Europe, not the EU as our headline suggested.
17 December 2011 12:00 AM
Out of his mind: We noted a tension in American ideas about money in a leading article on Monday.
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