Mea Culpa: One of the great social ills of our time

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

Does the PM’s anti-obesity drive have legs? Only time will tell... (Pool/AFP/Getty)

Many thanks to Zak Thomas for minding the shop while I was away. He prosecuted the campaigns against “ongoing”, “amid” and “it comes as” with suitably inquisitorial vigour.

Banned list update: Quite often I declare that a word is so confusing or ugly or useless that it should never be used, only to have someone point out some perfectly valid sentence in which it might be needed, or, worse, to find myself saying the word in speech. Thus there are only a few words I would ban outright, including decimate, utilise and iconic.

However, along comes another: societal. We don’t need it. Just as utilise is a long way of saying use, societal just seems an academic jargon way of saying social. I think it means “relating to a whole society”, in which case there is always a better way. Last week a comment article described terrorism as “a societal problem” and urged that governments should treat it accordingly. I think the author meant that terrorists rarely operate entirely alone.

In a news story about the assumption in the cosmetics industry that “fair” means “beautiful”, we referred to “societal changes happening in the US and Europe”. Nothing would have been lost by writing “changes in attitudes in the US and Europe”. And in a review of the film Unhinged we said: “TV and radio announcers speak of all kinds of societal ills – narcissism, lawlessness, and directionless anger.” Here I think we were trying to jazz up the familiar phrase “social ills” but better, really, to go straight into the list, which speaks for itself: “TV and radio announcers speak of narcissism, lawlessness, and directionless anger.”

An Americanism. Probably: We had a headline in the Daily Edition that read: “Despite muscle-flexing, Iran will likely avoid confrontation with Trump.” In British English, we would say Iran “is likely to” avoid confrontation; this use of the naked “likely” is an Americanism. It is fine; it is not wrong; it is a useful short headline word; but it is not our style.

Time’s right to remain silent: Every journalist has it drummed into them at an early age that you cannot end an article with the phrase “time will tell”, which is why you often see circumlocutions in the concluding paragraph of features or opinion columns such as “it remains to be seen” or “the real test is yet to come”. Yet we managed to have it in a headline last week: “Time will tell if the PM’s anti-obesity drive works.”

Joined up: That article also referred to estimates that “around 10 per cent of 4-5-year-olds are obese, rising to 20 per cent of 10-11-year-olds”. That is a lot of hyphens, and our style does not require them. “A five-year-old girl” is hyphenated, but “a five year old” is not. Also, we write out numbers below 10. So we should have written “around 10 per cent of four to five year olds”.