Mea Culpa: which pandemic and which invasion?

John Rentoul minds our language in last week’s Independent

Heaven is (not) a place on earth: the House of Representatives (AP)

For two years now, many of our writers have seemed to worry that our readers will not know to which pandemic they refer. It has been, therefore, the “ongoing pandemic”. Now that it has largely on-gone, at least as far as most news reporting is concerned, the dread adjective has attached itself to the most recent of Vladimir Putin’s invasions of Ukraine. Over the last week we have referred to Ukrainians protesting against “the ongoing invasion of their country” and to “the ongoing conflict”.

We know that Putin annexed Crimea and covertly backed secessionists in eastern Ukraine in 2014, but most of the time we can assume that any reference to an invasion or conflict means the current one. And on those few occasions when we need to distinguish between today and eight years ago, the last word we should use is “ongoing”.

Offputting: I have a similar aversion to “upcoming”, not because it is redundant, but because I think we should use “forthcoming” instead. I realise that this is a matter of personal taste, possibly because I still haven’t got over the shock of hearing people in television refer to an “upsum”, which is a newsreader’s summing-up or, in normal English, a summary.