Mea Culpa: Light years away from the true meaning of the phrase

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

Tread carefully when using metaphors from astrophysics (Nasa)

To use metaphors from astrophysics is to navigate a crowded asteroid belt: crashes are to be expected. We came a cropper with light years this week. Matthew Norman sarcastically welcomed the length of time Theresa May had taken to negotiate her Brexit deal: “It took her more than two years. But if it had taken two light years, or 200, it would be worth every nanosecond and more…”

John Schluter wrote to remind us that a light year is a measure of distance, not time. The time taken for light to travel 12 trillion miles is two years – the same as the time it took the prime minister to negotiate the withdrawal agreement and framework for the future relationship.

As Harrison said on Twitter the other day, “Time goes by so quickly. Especially milliseconds.”

Religious preference: I was taken to task this week for saying that the country faces three choices on Brexit: Theresa May’s deal, no deal or no Brexit. Julian Self wrote to say that I should have said we face one choice between three options.

“I know that lots of people use the term this way nowadays,” he said, “but just because lots of people are wrong in the same way doesn’t make them right – that sort of thinking is how religions get started.”

I disagree on both points. I think choice has long had two meanings: a decision and an option that could be chosen. But even if the use of choice to mean option were a new development, that would not make it wrong. We should be careful when a new usage is spreading, and especially if a lot of people don’t like it. But, at the risk of starting a new religion, my view is that if most people use a word to mean something that is what it means.

People are women too: We started a report on a hunger strike at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre by saying: “Scores of people in Britain’s only women’s removal centre have launched a hunger strike to protest against their indefinite detention…”

This juxtaposition of “people” and “women” struck Henry Peacock as odd. If the point was to avoid repeating the word “women”, we could have said “detainees” or “inmates”.

However, our careful reader adds: “I am pleased that The Independent continues to report on the shocking fact that so many people – both men and women – are still held in detention, and that the conditions they are held in are shocking too. The hostile environment is alive and well.”

From here to eternity: My forlorn campaign for “for ever” as two words is not making much progress. Obviously, it is a single word when it is an adverb, as when we wrote that “people are forever emerging from sculleries” in a review of Death and Nightingales on BBC2.

But otherwise, it doesn’t have to be one word, although it usually is. It just feels right to me when we write it as we did in our report of the German teenager who passed his driving test and then lost his licence 49 minutes later: “‘Some things last for ever – others not for an hour,’ officers said in a statement.”