Errors & Omissions: You can’t build an argument out of planks

Clichés, misfires, double negatives and deliberate obscurity in this week's Independent

One of the hoariest journalese clichés surfaced on Thursday in a story about weekend staffing of hospitals: “The claim over the number of excess deaths, which is a key plank of the Government’s argument for what it calls a ‘seven-day NHS’, is based on a research paper published in the BMJ last month.”

We all know what a keystone is, but I am not aware that carpenters recognise a “key plank”. And who knows what a “key plank” might be “based” on? In any case, metaphorical planks are used to build a political platform – a set of policy promises made by a candidate.

In what sense can an argument on a single issue be said to be made of planks? To suggest that it can is to get a long way away from any vividly imagined idea about planks, which is what happens when an image turns into a cliché.

• Yesterday, we reported on the removal from a case of the “flamboyant” High Court judge Sir Nicholas Mostyn. The story recalled: “After being annoyed at a legal decision while representing Earl Spencer during his divorce, he used the names of his pigs to avenge the judge in the case when it was settled out of court, calling them: James, Munby, Self-regarding, Pompous, Publicity, Seeking and Pillock.”

No, he didn’t avenge the judge, he took revenge on him. The object of the verb “avenge” seems to have been shifting recently. I think we should stick to avenging an injury or the person who suffered it. You don’t “avenge” the target of your revenge.

• Here is another verb with a shifting object, from a feature article on Wednesday: “You have been bestowed with a conscience, and your bank balance is starting to feel like a burden.” No, the conscience has been bestowed on you.

• This is from a Voices piece published yesterday: “We can be utterly appalled at the grisly random stabbing of Israelis on the streets of Jerusalem without ignoring the validity of the jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti’s declaration last month that the day the occupation ends is the day that real peace begins.”

That sentence is involved enough without the double negative implied in “without ignoring the validity of”. Such multiple negatives are easy to get wrong: they can end up saying the opposite of what the writer intended. This one does actually finish facing the right way, but the reader has to spend a moment working it out. But why not make it simple? Just write “while accepting”.

• “This recipe appeared in my first book, back in the day,” said a cookery article in last Saturday’s magazine. Why is the modish expression “back in the day” so annoying? I think it is the deliberate obscurity.

“Back in what day?” asks the baffled reader. “What, you mean you don’t know?” replies the smug writer, consigning the reader to the chilly exile of the incurably unfashionable.