Mea Culpa: opposites confused – splitting and fusing, over and under

Questions of style and language in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

(Getty Images)

In our report of the advance in nuclear fusion technology, in which the US National Ignition Facility succeeded in getting more energy out of a nuclear reaction than was put in, we said: “Proponents argue that fusion is much safer than nuclear fission, the process that powers all existing nuclear energy plants (and nuclear weapons).”

As Roger Thetford pointed out, early atomic weapons, such as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, used fission; but later hydrogen bombs use fission to trigger a fusion reaction that causes the main explosion. So we deleted the reference to nuclear weapons.

In another article on the same subject, we quoted Dr Robbie Scott, of the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Central Laser Facility Plasma Physics Group, who contributed to the research: “Fusion has the potential to provide a near-limitless, safe, clean, source of carbon-free baseload energy. It cannot be understated what a huge breakthrough this is for laser fusion research.”

That may indeed be what he said, but we changed it to what he meant, which was that it cannot be “overstated”.

Amid a sea of troubles: Linda Beeley writes to encourage me to resume my war against “amid”, that blemish on modern journalism. She was unimpressed with the headline, “Mental health patients left in dilapidated wards amid £677m repairs backlog.” That could have said “because of”.

She also drew my attention to this sentence in a report of a speech given by James Cleverly, the foreign secretary: “It also comes amid the backdrop of the ongoing war in Ukraine.” Amid the backdrop? That suggests the backdrop is a lined curtain and the foreign secretary is tangled between the layers. “Against the backdrop” is a terrible cliche, but at least it makes sense. And don’t get me started on “ongoing”. It is noticeable that “amid” and “ongoing”, two of the curses of thoughtless journalese, so often occur together.

Fewer words please: The English language would probably be better off without the word “comprise”. There is no need for it, and it is often used in ways that offend readers who were taught to use it differently. Thus we said: “Service sector costs are very largely comprised of wages and salaries in the private sector.” Conventionally, that should be “largely comprise wages and salaries” or “are largely composed of wages and salaries” (there is rarely a need for “very”). “Consist of” would also have been fine.

Notavirus: We had a headline in the Daily Edition that read: “NHS being pushed to brink by virus triple-threat.” Thanks to Louise Williams for pointing out that this was wrong. She was referring not to the rogue hyphen, but to the threats being Strep A, flu and norovirus (but not coronavirus). Strep A is caused by a bacterium, not a virus, so the headline was changed for the website to: “NHS creaking under strain of Strep A, flu and norovirus.”

Fashion report: We mentioned “a long sleeved t-shirt” in an article about the difficulty of finding warm children’s clothes. Thanks to Julian Self, who asked what I thought. My view is that T-shirt should be spelt with a capital T, because that is the shape the shirt is named after. However, as T-shirts are usually short-sleeved, we solved the problem by changing it to “a long-sleeved shirt”.