Mea Culpa: The affordable Neymar and other unbelievable bargains

Loaded words, substitute headlines and Americanisms – not them again! – in this week’s Independent

John Rentoul
Friday 04 August 2017 14:40 BST
Comments
Neymar against Gerard Piqué: you don’t get many of them to the pound
Neymar against Gerard Piqué: you don’t get many of them to the pound

We used the word “affordable” in an unexpected sense this week, in an article describing the £200m transfer deal for Neymar (he is an association footballer, m’lud) as “the bargain of the summer”. The sub-headline read: “The Brazilian is in the prime of his career at the top of his game and is affordable, by the standards of the transfer market this summer at least.”

For once, we were making the point that if someone – the Qatari government in this case – is willing to pay for something, it is, by definition, affordable.

Usually, we use the word either as a synonym for “cheap” or as a jargon word for subsidised housing. This week we called Mobike an “affordable, dockless bike scheme”, when we reported the Chinese bike-sharing scheme was coming to London. And we said VR headsets were “very affordable at well under £100”. If you want one, you would know that VR stands for virtual reality, so we didn’t need to spell it out, and if you really want one – and have the money – I suppose £100 is “affordable”.

But that is the trouble with “affordable”. Whereas “cheap” makes a comparison with the price of similar things, “affordable” makes a judgement about the ability of potential buyers to pay. There are not many people, or indeed football clubs, in the world for whom Neymar is “affordable”.

Which is why, when we are writing about property, I think we should put “affordable” in quotation marks. We usually do – Mary Dejevsky did yesterday and Janet Street-Porter did last Saturday – but the other day we wrote about affordable flats as if that were a mere description of them, rather than a loaded term with a truckload of assumptions behind it.

Travel chaos update: A headline in the Daily Edition, our subscription version, read: “Dover delays and poor weather spell chaotic start to holidays for many Brits.” Perhaps I stared at it for too long, but I thought using “spell” to mean “mean” was a bit odd – and “Brits” is a tabloid short-form that we should avoid.

So I was glad to see a different headline on the website version, except that it simply had different things wrong with it: “Europe-bound motorists face gridlock in Dover and beyond.” Those motorists were already in Europe, of course, and gridlock is a feature of grid-patterned American city streets, when blocked junctions cause other junctions to be blocked. We meant that motorists heading for the continent faced traffic jams.

Naming things: In a business “news in brief” on Friday last week about a dispute over the rights to recordings of a Beatles live concert, we referred to a company called “Sid Bernstein Presents LLC, named for the concert’s promoter”. Henry Peacock wrote in to say he presumed “named for” was an American usage. I thought it was a mannered old-fashioned English style, but Google confirmed that Henry Peacock is right. In British English we would usually say “named after”.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in