The Independent

Errors & Omissions: Like the disease itself, the 'battle with cancer' can always recur

26 May 2012 12:00 AM

This week the radio presenter Jenni Murray, in a terrific article in this newspaper, commented on the cliché that has patients fighting a "battle with cancer". As she and I, and I imagine every other cancer survivor, know perfectly well, there is no "battle". You have an illness; the doctors treat it. With luck you live, or you don't. That's it. Cancer is not an ogre, and you can't do anything to "fight" it.

Andy Coulson

20 May 2012 12:00 AM

Our front-page story last week asserted that Andy Coulson refused to sign a confidentiality clause when he became director of communications for the Conservative Party.

Errors & Omissions: How do you like your swear words – with or without asterisks?

19 May 2012 12:00 AM

How do you feel about bad language and asterisks? In its early years this newspaper took a very robust, even puritanical, attitude. It believed that its readers were the kind of people who didn't have net curtains in their windows and wanted the unvarnished truth.

Errors & Omissions: It seems that some functionless words were born only to make trouble

12 May 2012 12:00 AM

Here is a common homophone error with very odd origins. An analysis piece published on Tuesday said: "If Mr Putin really does believe that the opposition to him is not borne of a disgruntled middle class...".

Errors & Omissions: Insure yourself against the strange use of the term 'third party'

04 May 2012 08:00 PM

This is not exactly an error, just a very odd usage that seems to have become universal. Throughout the Gareth Williams inquest, everybody, including the coroner, has been referring to the possibility that the MI6 man was killed and zipped up into a holdall by a "third party".

Police survey

29 April 2012 12:00 AM

In an article of 18 March we referred to a health and fitness survey conducted by the Met police and said that it found 75 per cent of the force to be overweight. In fact, it found that of those who took part (around a fifth of all officers and staff) 75 per cent of the males surveyed were overweight.

Errors & Omissions: Different from and different to - they might just be the same as...

27 April 2012 08:00 PM

The admission last week that this column sees nothing very much wrong with "different to" has shocked the pedant community.

Errors & Omissions: In search of the final word on how to use prepositions properly

21 April 2012 12:00 AM

Prepositions can provoke violent loyalty and outrage. John Rentoul has been taken to task by another colleague in the office for having written in this space last week that it "does not matter much" whether you write "different from" or "different to". There are those who think "different to" is awful.

Errors & Omissions: Even the disinterested can be distracted now and again

14 April 2012 12:00 AM

In our excellent series about the failings of NHS nursing this week, we used "disinterested" to mean "uninterested", twice. It hardly matters, because no confusion of meaning is likely, but as long as there are enough people who care, we should try not to distract them unnecessarily. "Disinterested" means impartial, as in "not having an interest" in the outcome, whereas "uninterested" means lacking in curiosity. Thanks to Derek Watts, a reader from Lewes, for demonstrating that I am not alone in being distracted.

Margaret Hodge: less a grandmother than a senior politician

Errors & Omissions: When a factually correct headline masks a wildly sexist premise

07 April 2012 12:00 AM

"The granny with Sir Humphrey in her crosshairs" was the headline on the Monday Interview, the subject of which was Margaret Hodge MP, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, who is gunning for Whitehall mandarins.

Nature Studies column

06 April 2012 12:00 AM

The Nature Studies column by Michael McCarthy published yesterday, under the headline, "Bees, pesticides and Defra's weasel words", said that the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had placed a statement on its website on Monday denying the truth of a story published in The Independent last week, about the Defra Chief Scientist, Sir Robert Watson, asking for a review of the safety of neonicotinoid pesticides.

Errors & Omissions: Readers want to both gawp at pictures and learn a few facts

31 March 2012 12:00 AM

Many years ago, The Times had a reputation for publishing, in a spirit of superb hauteur, captions which did not condescend to tell you anything much about the picture. Maybe it was assumed that people who wanted to gawp at pictures rather than read text were not clever enough to want facts.