Mea Culpa: Vasco da Gama didn’t go that far

Words, phrases and usage in this week’s Independent

The Portuguese explorer reached Calicut, which isn't Calcutta (Morgan Library & Museum)

We wrote this week of when Vasco da Gama (above) “discovered” India “and reached Calicut (Calcutta) on 20 May 1498”. That has now been corrected, thanks to Kanika Datta, who wrote from New Delhi: “Calicut is located in the southern state of Kerala and Calcutta is the capital of the eastern state of West Bengal. It may interest your readers to know that the textile known as calico owes its origins to Calicut. Moreover, Calicut is now known as Kozhikode, and Calcutta as Kolkata.” The article now has “Kozhikode” in brackets.

On the bench: We got our substitutes back to front again in an editorial about the university lecturers’ strike. We said it was unfair to tell people that the pension on which they thought they could rely “will instead be substituted for an inferior provision”.

Thanks to Bernard Theobald for pointing it out. If you substitute a fresh player for a tired one, you hope to improve your team’s performance. The fresh player, the substitute, replaces the one who is limping.

So we appeared to be saying that the lecturers’ existing generous scheme would replace the inferior version, which makes no sense. The phrase now reads “will be replaced with an inferior provision”.

It’s multiplying: When you are sensitised to something, you notice it more. I thought the spreading tide of “multiple” was overwhelming. I was prepared to declare that resistance was useless and that we might as well accept that the word has become a synonym for “several”.

But I checked and, although we used multiple to mean several 25 times last week, “several” was five times as common, with 133 uses. So I say, fight back. We can turn the tide. Multiple is an ugly word, and there is no excuse for it in phrases such as “multiple locations across the globe”, “multiple flights” being cancelled and the consumption of “multiple sugary drinks daily”.

Nearly only: We tripped up by qualifying uniqueness a couple of times this week. A comment article about Brexit expounded on “the richness and diversity of languages and cultures that make the EU so unique in the world”. We could simply have deleted the “so”.

And in a review of Jake Bugg at the London Palladium we praised his “almost unique blend of country, blues and indie”. Unique means the only one of its kind, so “almost” unique means “not unique”. This is not just a matter of logic-chopping, because I think “almost unique” sounds like faint praise, whereas “rare”, which is what we probably meant, sounds more favourable.