Mea Culpa: Donald Trump, walking up and down the United States

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

The US president listens as Donald Trump Jr speaks during a campaign rally at Kenosha regional airport (AP)

Our coverage of the US election was of such high quality and quantity that it seems churlish to note a couple of slips. We captured the hurly burly of the closing days of the campaign with this malapropism: “Criss-crossing the country at a peripatetic pace, Trump addressed voters at nine separate events on Saturday and Sunday.”  

Thanks to Andrew Ruddle for pointing out that we probably meant “hectic”. “Peripatetic” does indeed mean “travelling from place to place”, such as a peripatetic teacher who works in more than one school or college, but it does not suggest a hurried pace. Indeed, it comes from the Greek peripatetikos, “walking up and down”, which implies a more leisurely progress.  

Out damned spot: In another article after voting had closed, we wrote about both sides combining to “get to work trying to erase the indelible tangerine stain”. As John Schluter wrote to say, the point about something that is indelible is that you can’t delete or remove it. It is one of those negatives that has lost its positive. Instead of talking about “delible” pens, we tend to buy “washable” markers. Personally, I think Donald Trump’s legacy will turn out to be washable.  

Vacuumometer: Tom Peck, our sketch writer, has been on fine, withering form recently, although he says modestly that the politicians mock themselves and he just writes it down. Last week he wrote about the prime minister: “The upper limit of the Johnson scale of shamelessness is still not known, but rarely has the nob been cranked up this high.” 

Of course, a “nob” is a rich or posh person, which might be used to describe Boris Johnson, but on this occasion I think we were clearly talking about the knob of a dial on a Heath-Robinson-like machine for measuring the absence of shame.  

Illiterally: In an article headlined “A galaxy not so far away” (well done whoever wrote that one), we said: “The light from the Andromeda galaxy has travelled for literally millions of years …” Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for pointing out that the “literally” there was literally redundant.  

Offcoming: “Ongoing” is bad enough anywhere, but worse in a headline. There was no need for it in this one: “Rolls-Royce axes 1,400 jobs as part of ongoing cutbacks.” Thanks to Iain Boyd for pointing it out. The report did explain, in its first paragraph, that the company had announced the cuts “as it continues with plans to slash its workforce by 9,000”. But “as part of cutbacks” would have been enough to make clear that the 1,400 job losses were part of a larger programme. Still, at least we hyphenated Rolls-Royce.