Mea Culpa: Where no man has gone, still

The Independent’s reporting has reached its nadir, according to Liam James

Nasa’s Mariner 10 flew by Mercury in 1974 – no human joined it (Nasa/AFP/Getty)

Last week, we reminded readers of when America first sent a person into orbit. At least, we did in the body of the article. In the caption for the accompanying picture of astronaut John Glenn entering his spaceship in 1962, we told readers he was “bound for Mercury”.

Thanks to Richard Lewis for pointing out that this was wrong. Of course, no country has yet attempted to send a human the 192 million kilometres from Earth to the sun’s closest neighbour. It was later in 1962 that Nasa sent an uncrewed probe to fly past Venus for the first time. It wasn’t until 1974 that they got near Mercury, still with no crew, with the Mariner 10 spacecraft.

Wild claim: The introduction to a liveblog on our site began: “Ukraine needs to ‘tone down’ its criticism of Donald Trump, the White House has claimed, after the US president launched an extraordinary attack on Volodymyr Zelensky.”

We said “claimed” where we should have said “said”. The White House adviser we quoted was offering an opinion. A claim is a statement presented as truth without evidence. We should be careful to keep that meaning in place for when we need it.

Lowest of the low: “Battered British army is at its lowest nadir since 1940”, read a headline in Friday’s Independent. “Nadir” means the lowest point, so the adjective here does not add any meaning. Removing the adjective would have left us with a headline that made no sense, so the fix would have been to replace “nadir” with “point”.

We repeated the tautology in the article text, where the same fix could have been applied. Thanks to Iain Brodie and John Harrison for flagging this one.

Out the back: In an article recounting Rachel Reeves’s questionable grip on the facts of her early career, we said the revelation of her inaccurate CV claims has forced the chancellor to “back-peddle”.

This mistake left the impression that Reeves was involved in some sort of illicit sales role (incidentally, not a claim she had made). We meant “backpedal” – a term for retraction which has outlasted the need for a hyphen.

Dismissed: We made two poor choices in one troubled News in Brief item about a woman receiving a payout after being unfairly dismissed while pregnant.

We said she had “been compensated nearly £94,000”. We meant she was “compensated by nearly £94,000”. The need for this rule is best demonstrated by replacing the cash figure with a word for something a person may be compensated by. “She was compensated a redundancy package,” for example.

Further down, we said a judge had ruled that the woman’s “pregnant condition” was the reason for her sacking. ‘Condition” was added unnecessarily here as its plural form is so often added to “weather”. We disparage it in both cases. “Pregnancy” would have been clearer.

Marching on: In a report on a football match, we said Real Madrid midfielder Jude Bellingham was given his directions by the referee. We chose to say that “the referee marched the midfielder”, which lands somewhere between two well-known phrases that fit the context.

Bellingham could have been “given his marching orders” or been “marched off the field”. Stephen Hall suggests we may have been trying to innovate and avoid turning to cliched phrases. We thank him for being generous. The phrase we used had less to offer than either of these. It lacked the whimsy of the former and the clarity of the latter.

In the same article, we said Bellingham’s marching orders came after he “protested the refereeing”. As has been noted before in this column, the standard British English is to “protest against”. Though the “against” may be dropped eventually due to American influence, for now, we come down on the side of the status quo.

This article originally said Mercury was 192 million miles from Earth. This was wrong. We meant kilometres and have updated the article to correct our mistake.