Mea Culpa: the attack on cement in the Gulf, and other mysteries

A quick-drying metaphor, an obscure military term and a carpenters’ affliction in this week’s Independent

Get set: UAE foreign affairs minister Anwar Gargash has denied Abu Dhabi played a role in what may soon be known as cementgate (Reuters)

Here is a headline usage I hadn’t come across before, on a story this week: “The Qatari hack cements the Middle East as the worst region in the world for fake news”. This use of “cements”, short for “cements the reputation of”, provides us with a new way of saying “confirms”. But the effect is unfortunate, because “the Qatari hack” is already hard to make sense of: I thought perhaps we meant “the Qatari hacks cement”, talking about a Qatari person who is attacking the cement with a pick-axe. I needed to read it twice to realise that Qatari is an adjective and hack is the noun – although for some older readers that might mean a journalist from Qatar.

The trouble is that the cement metaphor isn’t a good one in the first place. How can you set a reputation in cement, still less fix a whole region of the world in concrete? I think “...confirms the Middle East is the worst region…” would have been a stronger headline, and easier to understand.

Point person: We reported the opinion of Guy Verhofstadt this week that “Theresa May should make Jeremy Corbyn a member of her Brexit negotiating team”, and we described Mr Verhofstadt as “the European Parliament’s point man for Brexit”.

Henry Peacock wrote to say that he didn’t know what a point man was and to ask whether it was a reference to ice hockey. I don’t think so. The Oxford Dictionary says it is of military origin: “The soldier at the head of a patrol; the leader of an armed force.” But I didn’t know that. It is better not to use phrases the meaning of which is obscure, especially when they are sexist.

Outstanding digit: In an early version of our review of Dunkirk this week, we said that the performance of Harry Styles – he is a popular singer diversifying into the acting business, m’lud – does not “stick out like a saw thumb”. Thanks to John Schluter, who spotted it.

I suppose that if you sawed into your thumb it might be noticeable, or that a saw thumb might be an affliction of carpenters. It is a “sore thumb”, although it is a mystery as to why it should stick out any more than a painless thumb. Perhaps when manual work was more common, the inability to use a thumb attracted more attention.