Errors & Omissions: How many endings can you cleave into a sentence?

Irregular verbs, 'doubles', inelegant variations and a homophone in this week's Independent

People outside a closed bank after the Wall Street Crash

The Society for the Preservation of English Irregular Verbs is mildly disappointed by this sentence, from Monday’s Economic View article: “And after evidence of epic malfeasance emerged in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the banking leviathan created by John Pierpont Morgan was cleaved in two by government fiat.”

There is nothing actually wrong with “cleaved”, but it is an opportunity missed. The society’s advice is always to use a past participle that doesn’t end in -ed where one is available. The Oxford Dictionary recognises four forms for the past participle of “cleave”: cloven, clove, cleaved and cleft. Surely “cloven” wouldn’t have been too baroque, even for an Economic View.

• Yesterday we ran two pieces about the new movie Kill Your Friends – a film review on an arts page, and a feature article about what it was like to work in the music industry in the 1990s. Nothing wrong with that, except they were both illustrated with the same still from the film, showing Nicholas Hoult in the starring role. Not the end of the world, but ideally the two departments would have kept in touch and made sure it didn’t happen.

Or perhaps I am too much influenced by my background as a news sub-editor. In that world, a “double” – using the same story or image twice on different pages of the same newspaper – is a major embarrassment. But when, leafing casually through a paper, I found a double and pointed it out to my late father-in-law, a distinguished political correspondent, he couldn’t understand why I thought it mattered.

• A news story published on Tuesday began like this: “Children are less likely to suffer asthma if they grow up in a household with a dog compared to children in families without a pet canine.”

It is sad to see the desperate expedients to which writers sometimes resort in their efforts to avoid repeating a word; in this case the dog has become a “pet canine”. Everything after the word “dog” is redundant anyway. Children with a dog are less likely to suffer asthma. Less likely than whom? Children without a dog, obviously; you don’t have to spell that out.

• “The group comprises a loose-knit network of Serbian and Montenegrin nationals that Interpol has likened, for its cell-like nature, to al-Qaeda,” said a feature article on Tuesday about diamond thieves.

Can a group comprise a network? “Comprise” means “take together”; you have to comprise more than one thing. This group is a network.

• Wednesday’s obituary of the actor and writer Colin Welland threw up a homophone error that you don’t often see, when it referred to “A tender story of boy orphaned by IRA attacks seeking piece in the countryside of Donegal”.

Both “peace” and “piece” entered Middle English from French, and the words paix and pièce still exist in modern French. The odd thing is that in English they are now pronounced the same.