Mea Culpa: Numbers and where they come from

Figures, percentages, singulars and plurals in this week’s Independent

Best Actor: Gary Oldman was among the winners at this year's Oscars (Getty)

Our film page featured this short headline this week: “Netflix has quietly released their new Gary Oldman-starring movie.” We often confuse our singulars and plurals, although not usually in one single-sentence headline. “Netflix has…” treats the company as a singular entity, which is The Independent’s style, but then it switches to “their” new movie. That should be “its”. Our style is that companies and organisations are singular, while sports teams and music bands are plural.

As for “Gary Oldman-starring”, presumably that happened because we try to put important names early in headlines, but this made for an awkward construction. We could have dropped the “-starring” because, if he stars in it, it would be fine to call it a “Gary Oldman movie”.

Go, figure: We had a few odd headlines this week. Such as this one, on Thursday: “Government policy forced 190 women to prove they were raped in order to get child benefits, figures show.” Well, 190 is a figure and that is what it shows. The report was about statistics published by the Department of Work and Pensions. The important fact is that these are official figures, so “official” should have been in the headline.

Another headline read: “Cash machines disappearing at rate of 300 per month, research finds.” Again, “research finds” adds nothing, unless we know the source of the figure. It was from Which?, the magazine of the normally reliable Consumers’ Association, so I think we could simply have reported the 300 per month figure as a fact.

Still, I must praise the sub-headline on that report, which said: “Rate of closures has increased sixfold in the period from November 2017 to April 2018.” Quite often we would say the rate had increased by 500 per cent or even something spuriously precise such as 513 per cent. However, “sixfold” is easier for the reader to grasp.

Most amid? Last week I mentioned the fondness of journalists for “amid”, a useful and flexible linking word, but one that we tend to use too much. One form of it, however, we do not need at all. “Amidst”, which the Oxford Dictionary calls a “literary variant”, tends to be used by sports writers. “Amidst the disappointment there remained a profound hope” we said this week, of Egypt’s fading World Cup run.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but we use “amongst” a lot too, although “among” would seem to suffice perfectly well. I have no idea what an adverbial genitive is, so I will merely report what the dictionary says: “The –st of amongst represents –s (adverbial genitive) plus –t probably by association with superlatives (as in against).”

I know what a superlative is, but the idea of “amonger” and “amongest” makes no sense to me. I think it means we can do without it.

Anti-curmudgeon: To show that I’m not just a negative grump, allow me to congratulate whoever it was who wrote this headline on our report of England’s second World Cup match: “Kane’s Panama hat-trick.”

And a special commendation to Derek Adams for his “10 best” lawnmowers in which he described them as “sward swallowers”.