Mea Culpa: big-scale, wide-scale, upscale – let the scales fall from our prose

John Rentoul reviews language and usage in last week’s Independent

Oh dear: don’t get your antlers in a tangle over animal plurals (Getty)

In a headline about the early evidence of a fifth wave of coronavirus in the UK we said “fears mount over large scale summer events”. It is a curious thing about journalists that we seem to be afraid of the word “big”. Perhaps we think it is too simple – childish even – and so we use circumlocutions such as “large-scale” instead. We meant Glastonbury and Wimbledon, which are big events, so we could just call them that.

We did the same referring to “large-scale cattle ranches established on cleared forest land” in the Amazon basin. A ranch is defined by the Oxford dictionary as “a large farm” (from Spanish rancho, a group of people eating together), so it doesn’t need the adjective.

And a similar thing happened in an editorial, which said that, at the time of the last general election, “no one would have predicted that there would be a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia less than three years later”. We needed to distinguish it from the covert invasion of parts of Ukraine by local proxies that had already happened, but a simple “full invasion” would have sufficed.