Mea Culpa: a modern reconstruction inextricably linked to the original

Not quite the whole picture: plus confusions, over-long words and clichés in this week's Independent

The Antikythera Mechanism: a reconstruction (left) and a fragment of the original

The Antikythera Mechanism is a remarkable bronze machine made by the Greeks in the second or third century BC for predicting movements of the sun, moon and stars. On Wednesday we reported new research into how it worked and what it was for.

Unfortunately, we illustrated it with a modern reconstruction (above left), rather than with a fragment of the real thing (right).

Incidentally, the explanation made the point that, for the ancient Greeks, eclipses, the colour of the moon and the weather “were inextricably linked”, whereas we now know there is no connection between them.

Something else that is inextricably linked is the word inextricably, which almost always appears with linked. Can we not think of something else?

Undemocratic: This week the Canadian parliament voted to change the words of the country’s national anthem, from “true patriot love, in all thy sons command” to “true patriot love, in all of us command”. In our report on Thursday, we quoted Christine Moore, “a democratic member of parliament”, welcoming the change.

Most MPs believe in democracy. What we meant was that she was a representative of the New Democratic Party, so we could have called her “a New Democratic MP”.

In the same report we referred to the MP who introduced the bill as suffering from an “aggressive version of ALS”. I had to look it up. It stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which would not have enlightened me much. It is better known in Britain as motor neurone disease. We should have called it that.

Unutilisable: Six instances of “utilise” on our pages this week. On Wednesday, for example, we said Jonny Hall, vocalist and guitarist with Heck, was “utilising all the subtleties of a bull with a nuclear device strapped to its horns wreaking havoc in your ma’s china shop”.

All The Independent’s computers ought to be set to change this ugly, over-long word automatically. It would be a simple matter to delete “tili” where possible, which is always.

Unscalable: We said on Thursday that SinoFortone, the Chinese company interested in buying Liverpool Football Club, “specialises in large-scale infrastructure projects, building roads, railways, airports, seaports and power stations across China and the Middle East”.

I thought this use of “large-scale” to mean “big” was a common feature of business reporting, but we also said on Thursday that “the feared large scale clashes between English fans and Russian gangs did not materialise” in Lille.

That one should have been hyphenated, if we were using it at all (I may write about hyphenating compound adjectives another time), but I thought “serious” clashes would have been better.