Mea Culpa: a flashy backlash against mixed metaphors

Misfires, misdiagnoses and other style stumbles in The Independent this week

By Stevage – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Commons

In a lively comment article on Wednesday about advertisers co-opting feminism, we got carried away: "Aside from being a flash in the pan, a backlash has firmly begun against the brand-owned, image-led idea of empowerment that is pushed by advertising."

I thought that was a mixed metaphor, because I assumed that a flash in the pan was to do with cookery. It turns out that it started as a phrase about early firearms. A small amount of gunpowder was lit in a pan next to the touch hole: the flash from it was supposed to go through the hole to ignite the main charge. Sometimes the flash would fail to fire the gun, so a flash in the pan came to mean a brief show followed by failure.

So it is a mixed metaphor because then we had a backlash, which was originally a term for gears crashing briefly into reverse. It could apply to the recoil from a gun, I suppose, but that would mean that there hadn't been just a flash in the pan because the gun had actually gone off.

Kill or cure: We reported new findings about the cancer risk from processed meat on Thursday. For once, we quoted the definition of processed meat – I've never been sure what it meant – from the study: "Meat that has been preserved by smoking, curing or salting, or by the addition of preservatives. Examples include ham, bacon, pastrami and salami, as well as hot dogs and some sausages."

However, we also said: "Over 7,000 people are diagnosed with stomach cancer each year in the UK, leading to around 5,000 deaths." It is not the diagnoses that lead to death – if they are early enough, they may avert it – it is the cancer. We should have said, "... and around 5,000 die from it."

Emotional guidance: We usually avoid telling our readers how to feel about information we give them. On Monday, however, we reported that Neil Gaiman would after all be adapting Good Omens, the book he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett, for TV. “Gaiman had previously refused to tackle the project without Pratchett, who sadly died in March 2015,” we said. We didn’t need to tell the reader that Pratchett’s death was sad.

Melted economists: We responded to the publication on Monday of the Treasury’s report on the consequences of the UK leaving the EU with a quick assessment of the main points of the document, but said that “the key in the coming hours will be to pour over the Treasury’s assumptions”. We meant “pore”, which means to be absorbed in reading, having before that meant to think intently. The word for tipping out a liquid sounds the same, but is spelled differently.

As in so many cases, there is no good reason why either meaning should be spelled the way that has been settled on by convention, and there is no confusion of meaning here – merely in my case a mild synaesthesia as I imagine trained economists melting over Treasury spreadsheets. But these things are markers of quality, and if enough of our readers think a spelling is “wrong” it makes them trust our reporting less. We may think it ought not to matter, but it is in our interest to get it “right”.