Mea Culpa: an iceberg as big as a country most people couldn’t place on a map

Units of journalese measurement, hyphen trouble and cliches in this week’s Independent

The incipient iceberg about to break off from Antarctica

Journalese is a special dialect with its own units of measurement. Size is measured in double-decker buses, weight in bags of sugar and area on a scale ranging from football pitches to areas the size of Wales or Belgium. On Saturday, however, we came up with an unexpected variation, as an Antarctic ice shelf prepared to shed “an iceberg as big as a US state or Trinidad and Tobago”.

Thanks to John Schluter for drawing this my attention. You can see what happened here. We reported that the incipient iceberg covered an area of 1,930 square miles. If you convert this to square kilometres, it is 4,999, so the original report presumably spoke of about 5,000 square km of ice.

From there we refer to the lists of “political and geographic subdivisions” by area on Wikipedia, and Trinidad and Tobago is the nearest country to the magic 5,000 square km figure. But there are two problems with this. One is that the country is two islands, although Tobago is much smaller than Trinidad. The other is that it is not a unit of size familiar to most of our readers, most of whom are British or American.

Possibly that was why we added “as big as a US state”, but that only makes it worse. US states vary in size, and this iceberg is between the size of the two smallest states: Rhode Island (4,000 square km) and Delaware (6,400 square km).

All most confusing. Yet a better option stares us in the face on that Wikipedia list. As a British news organisation, we could simply have gone for “an iceberg as big as Northumberland”, which is 5,026 square km.

Hyphen-ventilating: An extreme form of a common problem with hyphens affected this sub-headline on Wednesday: “This new firestorm will complicate the confirmation hearings of top appointees like the Secretary of State-in-waiting, the former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson …” That makes it look as if Mr Tillerson is the Secretary of something called the State-in-waiting. Yet if we called him Secretary-of-State-in-waiting the string of hyphens becomes daunting.

We should have rewritten it anyway, because our style is name first, title second. While we are at it, “like” should strictly be “such as”, because we meant Mr Tillerson, not people like him, and CEO is both an abbreviation and an American one. So we could have written “... such as Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil boss selected to be Secretary of State …”

Time travel: A fine example of many people’s least favourite redundancy appeared in this assessment of the funeral of Rafsanjani, the former Iranian President: “His absence in balancing the competing powers … will affect Iran going forward.” One of these days there will be an event that affects people going backwards.

Imperfect gust of wind: The Independent Daily Edition carried this sub-headline on Tuesday: “A perfect storm of risk factors makes this month the most dangerous for cardiovascular disease.” The phrase “perfect storm” was popularised by a book with that title in 1997, about the Halloween nor’easter storm that hit the east coast of the US in 1991, and the film of the book. It meant hard-to-predict factors coinciding to produce an exceptional event, but it is losing its meaning through over-use.

The combination of predictable seasonal factors that lead to a rise in heart attacks in January is almost the opposite of its original sense.