Mea Culpa: Ripping yarns

Susanna Richards presents the latest round-up of our errors and omissions

A restorative Christmas to one and all (Getty)

Welcome to the festive edition of your favourite head-in-hands gripefest. It may be Christmas, but there’s not been much let-up on the sub-editing desk. “Ministers rip up rules to protect asylum seekers” read the headline in our Daily Edition one morning last week. This is all very well, but as reader Henry Peacock wrote to point out, it wasn’t clear whether the government had done something bad or something good.

I did wonder whether a dramatic change of heart had occurred: could it be that those in charge of our immigration policies had indeed been subject to a visitation, perhaps by some Christmas spirit? Sadly not. My esteemed colleague suggests that we could have put something like “Sunak rips up rules that protect asylum seekers” instead, which would have removed any ambiguity.

Back to scule: I’m sorry to report that we still seem to be writing miniscule instead of minuscule, most recently in an article about business rates. We really ought to know better. Having said that, there has been a marked decline of late in the number of times we’ve misspelt it: from nine instances in August, and five in September, we are now down to about once a month. So perhaps people are paying attention after all. We’ve still not quite got to grips with a different bugbear, though, having written in a report about the sad state of affairs in the NHS that a patient “had suffered mental health illness from a young age”. Enough of this nonsense: “had suffered from mental illness” would have been perfectly acceptable.