Mea Culpa: Minding our Ps and Qs

Prepositions and question marks, that is, writes Susanna Richards

‘Shall I compare thee with a summer’s day?’ would imply a rather different sentiment (Getty)

One of our writers, an MP, used what I thought was an unusual expression in an article for us last week. She wrote that the people she speaks to in the course of her work frequently have to “cover off” her views on the prime minister before getting down to business.

I say unusual, but it could just be that it doesn’t make it into our copy very often, and as such I had never heard of it. A brief gad about on the language forums revealed that it seemed to be a recent-ish phrase, and somewhat colloquial, and that it means, well, “reveal” – I suppose, in a literal sense, to remove the cover from something. We didn’t change it, and perhaps that means my colleagues are better acquainted with interesting modern jargon than I am, but I wonder how many of our readers knew what it meant. Consider this a public service announcement.

A damming indictment: Not just a generic mea culpa, this one, but properly my fault was a near miss in an article about farming, in which a source mentioned the prime minister’s comment that we need to “build back beaver”. I’m afraid I thought it was a mistake, given the well-known phrase is “build back better”, and that someone’s autocorrect had inserted a wild creature into our copy where no wild creature should be. On investigation, though, it appeared it was correct, and referred to the government’s commitment to restoring certain species to their natural habitats… as, duly, was this particular beaver to its rightful place in the article.