Mea Culpa: How to say the opposite of what you mean

Substitution, mixed metaphors and Americanisms in The Independent this week

Theresa May delivering her speech on meritocracy last week

Our editorial last Friday said we were worried that the Prime Minister’s planned new grammar schools would “attract an influx of the affluent seeking places, which pushes property prices up and, once again, substitutes academic selection for the principle of ‘whoever pays, wins’.” It’s a confusing bit of phraseology, but what we meant was the reverse of what is written, as Bernard Theobald wrote to point out.

To substitute x for y means that you put x in the place of y, but this meaning clashes with the usual logic of English sentences, which is that you put the starting state first and the end state last. We meant “...substitutes the principle of ‘whoever pays, wins’ for academic selection.”

Mixed metaphor: “Spark” is a favourite word with journalists looking for a short way to say that one thing has led to another, but we often forget its origin as a metaphor, of making a spark to start a fire. On Wednesday, for instance, we said: “The exclusion of female candidate’s names from campaign materials ahead of municipal elections in the West Bank and Gaza has sparked a new focus on women’s civil rights in Palestinian society.”

So someone is lighting a fire and using a lens to make women’s civil rights legible? No, it doesn’t work.

Of American grammar: The functionless American “of” is gaining ground in The Independent, as reader Richard Harvey points out. On Wednesday we had a sub-headline that read: “Outside of the Paralympic Games, the latest prosthetic technology uses electrodes...”

And in an article on the business pages on the same day, we said Brexit “isn’t as big of a deal to Dyson as it is to any number of British firms”.

In both cases, the “of” is surplus to requirements.

Wide-scale adjectives: “Companies from Toshiba to Mattel have been plagued by safety concerns and large-scale product recalls,” we reported on Thursday. “Large-scale” is an ugly way to say “big” or “major” or “extensive”, but the more you think about it, the less you need any intensifier at all. If companies the size of Toshiba or Mattel have been “plagued” by them, the reader can safely assume that the product recalls have been significant.