Mea Culpa: When it comes to extra syllables...

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

Fearful symmetry: Orwell was against the ‘padding’ of sentences (Granger/Shutterstock)

When it comes to” is one of those dead phrases that sounds as if it ought to have been on George Orwell’s list, in his essay “Politics and the English Language”, of “verbal false limbs”. I don’t know why he called them that – a poor choice of words to describe the habit of choosing words poorly – but we know what he meant as he gave examples: “render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of” and so on.

As he said, these “save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry”.

Each time we used “when it comes to” over the past week, a simple short word would have been better. In a “news in brief” item on the best “good news” story of the week, namely the $788m (£634m) paid out by Fox News, we said: “The network, in a statement, admitted that a Delaware court found ‘certain claims about Dominion to be false’, but that’s likely as far as the broadcaster will go when it comes to considering its prominent role in broadcasting election conspiracies to viewers.” That could have been “in considering its prominent role”, but there is a problem with “considering” as well. I think we meant something like “in taking responsibility for...”