Mea culpa: tell me why the caged dog is free

Questions of style and use of English (and some French) in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

A report involving an XL bully dog featured a ‘lovely malapropism’ (PA)

In a report from the stranger side of life, we invited readers to “meet the man driving across the country to ‘rescue’ XL bully dogs”. It takes all sorts. We reported: “He’s discovered three abandoned in the area around his home in Tipton while helping rescue another found in an emancipated state in a cage outside a car wash.”

What a lovely malapropism. We changed it to “emaciated”, meaning abnormally thin, especially because of illness or a lack of food. The dog was about to be “emancipated”, or set free, but it could hardly be free while it was in the cage.

Top and bottom of the year: On our business pages we said that shopping at Aldi would “save you a substantial amount of money, according to the monthly survey of prices put out by Which?” The consumer group tests a basket of 43 products in different supermarkets. “Aldi was the cheapest in 11 of the last 12 months of 2023, with its rival Lidl coming top in the other.”

The year 2023 consisted of the last 12 months, so we didn’t need to say it twice. We deleted “of 2023”. But also, the word “top” to refer to the shop with the lowest prices seems wrong and distracting; perhaps we could have said “Lidl did best in the other”.

Atonal music: In an article on Monday about legal battles over abortion in the US, we said that they “reached a particular crescendo in Texas last month with the blocking and eventual denial of a court-ordered abortion for 31-year-old mother of two, Kate Cox”. Thanks to John Schluter for reminding us that a crescendo in music is “a gradual increasing in force or loudness”; Italian from the Latin crescere, to grow. It is often used metaphorically to mean the loudest or most dramatic point, but it is better to use a different word to avoid confusing musicians. We changed it to “crisis”.

Hidden prestige: We have done this before, and possibly referring to Harry and Meghan before. “When they first left Britain, they had a cache that was very appealing to brands,” we quoted a “brand and culture expert” as saying. We meant cachet, which means prestige and is pronounced cashay, rather than cache, which means hidden store and is pronounced cash.

Thanks to Gavin Turner for pointing this out, possibly not for the first time. Both words are French in origin, which may explain the confusion. Cachet, meaning a seal affixed to a document, was apparently borrowed by the Scots from the French in the 1630s. Its meaning evolved via the French lettre de cachet, “letter under the seal of the king”, to “symbol of prestige” by 1840.

Lightfingered: We misused another French word in an editorial last week about the prime minister’s claim to have abolished the backlog of asylum applications. He did it by defining applications before a certain date as the “legacy” backlog and abolishing that, while new applications continued to pile up. We said that “the public are not taken in by his spin and legerdemain”.

This was too clever, adding a posh multisyllabic foreign word when the crisp British “spin” was all that was needed. Thanks to Mike Webster for pointing out that it also contradicted the point of the editorial, which was that the government’s attempt to manipulate the figures was clumsy rather than something that could be compared to the skilful use of hands in performing a magic trick.

Maxed out: We had a headline on the front page last weekend that read: “US airline grounds all Boeing 737 Max after plane’s window blows out.” I have since seen the planes referred to as 737 Maxes in the plural, which I think is better, because that is how I would pronounce them.

Phasers to stun: In a review of blenders – in my humble opinion an unnecessary item of kitchenware – we said that the motor of one of them “seemed to be unphased by thick and claggy mixtures”. Richard Hanson-James wondered briefly if this was a reference to a single-phase electric motor, but decided that we meant “unfazed”.

To faze means to disturb or disconcert someone, or in this case an anthropomorphised inanimate object. It used to be 19th-century US English, possibly a variant of mid-15th-century Kentish dialect feeze, “to frighten, alarm, discomfit”, from Old English fesian or fysian, “drive away, send forth, put to flight”.

Star Trek is probably responsible for the confusion, as “phasers” were the standard weapon of Starfleet.