Mea Culpa: a monster comparison we saved for a rainy day

John Rentoul on questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

How much water does the monster need to hide in?

We journalists love our bags of sugar, double-decker buses and areas the size of Wales. We had an unusual outbreak of analogese last week. The standard measure of the volume of water is Olympic-sized swimming pools, but this time we reported that 3 October was the wettest day in the UK since records began, “with the level of rainfall exceeding the volume of water in Loch Ness”.

Full marks for trying, but how much water is that really, spread over the entire country? All I know is that Loch Ness is deep, which is why no one can find the monster, but the quantity is hard to relate to what happened on that date, which is that, even in London, it basically rained all day.

Whomsoever winneth: We had this headline on an economic opinion article: “Whoever wins the US election is not so important for the economy”. I could see it wasn’t right, although it was clear what it meant, and I couldn’t immediately work out what was wrong with it or how to fix it. The best I could do was: “Whoever wins the US election, the economy will do well over the next decade.”