Mea Culpa: an area the size of 20 football pitches

The difference between square metres and metres square, and other usage and spelling glitches in this week’s Independent

Football pitches on Hackney Marshes, 1951 (@HistoricalPics)

In a report this week on the battle of Mosul, we reported that the remaining Isis fighters control a “500 square metre area”. We meant a 500 metre square area, although later in the story we were more precise, describing the area as “a rectangle no more than 300 by 500 metres beside the Tigris”.

We compounded the error by translating it into square yards, saying in brackets “600 square yards”. This was pointless, as the size of the rectangle was approximate in the first place.

An area of 500 square metres would be a square with sides of about 22 metres (22x22=484). As we said “tens of thousands of civilians are believed to be trapped” in this confined space, this implies at least 40 people per square metre. The area we were talking about is actually about 150,000 (300x500) square metres, but few readers have a clear sense of how big that is. We could have resorted to the old journalistic device of comparing it to 20 football pitches, but actually I found the 300 by 500 metre rectangle easy enough to visualise: we should have stuck to that.

The report was from a news agency, and the error was in the original copy, but we should have spotted it. Thanks to Philip Nalpanis, who did.

Unconditioned: We reported on an Australian review of the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies on Saturday. The review looked at 176 studies, “focused on 68 different health conditions” – and found no evidence that homeopathy was more effective than a placebo in any case. “Conditions” is one of those words that ought to be flagged automatically on any journalist’s computer. “Weather conditions” means “weather”; sometimes just “conditions” means “weather”; “wet conditions” means “rain”; and “health conditions” means “illnesses”.

Go without: Conservative ministers have set public-sector pay for the past seven years, ignoring expert advice – or at least dictating to the experts what the limits would be. “Now, after an almighty backlash and with Labour ahead in the polls,” we wrote in a comment article this week, “they want to call the technocrats back in and forgo this particular power.”

Before it was changed, we wrote “forego”, which is now a common spelling of the word meaning “go without”. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionary lists “forego” as a “variant spelling of forgo”. Of course it shouldn’t matter, but there are still a few people out there who think the “e” is wrong, a confusion with “foregone”, which means “gone before”, as in a conclusion that could have been reached from the outset.

As ever, my view is that it is worth knowing that some sticklers think there is a right and a wrong way to spell it, and to leave out the “e”.