Mea Culpa: mishearings and broken silences

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent, as deciphered by John Rentoul

The Pope sat on a homophone in Iraq (Bel Trew)

In the old days, newspaper reports were often dictated over the phone to copytakers, and hilarious results ensued as misheard words made their way into print. That doesn’t happen so much now that journalists type their own copy and send it via email, or put it directly into the office system online. But the mondegreen (named after the mishearing of the phrase “laid him on the green” in the ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray”) is making a comeback. Journalists increasingly use transcription programmes, which turn audio recordings into the written word, but which are only patchily reliable.

John Schluter, a reader, wondered if this was what had happened in the early version of the first paragraph of our report from the Pope’s visit to Iraq: “Clad in white, Pope Francis sat on a gleaming thrown in the Iraqi city of Mosul, dwarfed by slabs of concrete that dangled limply from the metal sinews of bombed out buildings.”

In fact, the artificial intelligence in most transcription programmes is sophisticated enough to work out the right spelling of “throne” from the context, so I think that must have been simple human error.