Mea Culpa: unexpected bumps in the smooth path of language

Tautology, confusion and 134 uses of an unnecessary word in this week’s Independent

We carried this headline on Thursday: “Australia launches new $5 banknote with ‘raised bumps’ to help blind people.” This “raised” two important questions. What other kinds of bumps are there? And why was this tautology in quotation marks?

Model treasure: Talking of money, I have seen “hoard” being used instead of “horde” before. One means a store of treasure and the other means an army of nomadic warriors, but they are similar in the figurative sense of a collection of people or things, and so they are often confused. On Tuesday, though, we had a usage I hadn’t seen before: “We’re hoarded into these small spaces,” we quoted a former model as saying in an article about Donald Trump’s modelling agency.

The model had been interviewed by Mother Jones, the American magazine, so I was able to check the original quotation. What she had actually said was: “We’re herded into these small spaces.”

Heart-stopping: We used the word “flatlining” three times this week. Once in a picture caption in the app edition on Tuesday, which said: “The numbers in apprenticeships such as this one in Liverpool are flatlining.” And once in an article about house prices on Thursday, which said a Treasury analysis “was consistent with a flatlining of average prices”. In both cases, we meant that the trend line on a graph of numbers or prices would be flat or, more simply, the numbers or prices were not changing.

It was only in a review of Popstar on Thursday last week that we used the word in something close to its original sense. The review referred to “Bill Hader’s roadie, whose hobby is ‘flatlining’ (inducing near-death experiences in which his heart stops beating)...” The term originally referred to a heart monitor, when a flat line would indicate that the patient was dead.

To use it simply to mean “no change” risks confusing a steady state with a heart-stopping disaster.

Offputting: We used “ongoing” 134 times last week, according to our database. I know it is a bit late to try to hold back the tide, but it is worth pointing out that in every case except one (“France’s previous and ongoing ban on face veils” should have been “previous and current bans”), deleting the word would have improved the sentence and made the world a marginally better place.