Mea Culpa: who is ditching Donald Trump now?

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

Representative Tom Rice, a former Trump loyalist (Rep Tom Rice/YouTube)

In our coverage of the trial of Donald Trump, we reported that Tom Rice was one of the Republican members of the House of Representatives who voted with the Democrats to impeach the president. We said: “Rice’s support for impeachment shows how some Trump loyalists are now prepared to say ‘enough is enough’ and withstand pressure from their support base to ditch him.” As Bernard Theobald wrote to point out, we got that muddled, making it seem as if the Trump support base now wants to ditch the president. 

It’s easy enough to work out that we meant some loyalists such as Rice were abandoning Trump despite pressure from their support base, but we shouldn’t make our readers read things twice to make sense of them. Simply deleting “to ditch him” would have fixed it.

Hold your horses: We often get our horse-based figures of speech wrong, and did so in a picture caption last week: “Joe Biden didn’t expect this economic legacy when he takes the reigns.” Thanks to Iain Boyd for spotting this one, which should be “reins”.  

We made the same mistake the previous week, when we quoted someone who had voted for Donald Trump to stop “them”, the people who are “taking Amen out of prayer”. She was worried that if Biden won, “They will have free reign to do whatever they want with our country.” You can see why “reign” makes sense in that sentence, but the original phrase meaning to let someone do what they want is “free rein”, allowing a horse to go as it pleases. Thanks to John Schluter for letting me know about that one. 

Dropping the “of”: Mick O’Hare wrote to praise Lawrence Ostlere’s “lovely” Editor’s Letter about the FA Cup. In it our sports writer said his mum would comment on the football before walking “out the room”. O’Hare thought The Independent’s style would be to say “out of the room”.  

I think “out the room” is colloquial and natural, so it works for me. All the same, if a single reader trips over it, especially one who enjoyed the rest of the article, it would be better to have the “of”.  

Possession: The Independent’s rule for apostrophes and words ending in “s” is that you should write it as you say it. So “Vilnius’ TV tower”, “Aquis’ chief executive” and “Wendy Williams’ Lessons Learned report” last week should have been, as Richard Hanson-James pointed out, “Vilnius’s TV tower”, “Aquis’s chief executive” and “Wendy Williams’s Lessons Learned report”. But “under the Republicans’ noses” was right.

Afterthought: One of our reports of zealous policing of coronavirus restrictions was headlined: “Couple caught breaking lockdown after being rescued from hilltop.” In fact the two events were the same: the rescue being the moment they were caught allegedly breaking the rules. We could have said: “Couple caught breaking lockdown when rescued from hilltop.”