It was a news story, not a geography quiz
John Rentoul’s regular round-up of our errors and omissions
A story in the “World news in brief” section in our app edition on Thursday was headlined, “Murdered teacher’s family sues town, school system and cleaners over her death.” It was, as reader John Schluter noted, a “fairly detailed and informative” report, except that it did not say which town and where in the world it is.
Americans might recognise Danvers High School and know that Danvers is a town in the greater Boston area in Massachusetts. A British reader might, like Mr Schluter, guess the US state from a reference to The Salem News, but this was a news story not a quiz.
It turns out that the report was taken from agency copy datelined “Lawrence, Mass.”, a not particularly helpful piece of information for a non-American audience that was in any case dropped to fit our format. It just needed someone to insert “Danvers, Massachusetts” at some point in the first paragraph.
Bitter whine: A comment article on Tuesday on Donald Trump’s unwillingness to say that he would accept the result of the US presidential election said: “What proportion of Trump supporters is crazy enough to interpret sour grapes of the kind as a call to arms ... is unknowable.”
This is a common misuse of the story in Aesop’s fables of the fox who decided, as he could not reach the grapes, that they must be unripe and that he didn’t want them after all. Trump’s suggestion that he might be cheated of the presidency in a rigged election is the opposite: if he loses, we can be sure that he is not preparing to say, “I was running for election only to gain publicity for my businesses; I never wanted to be president anyway.”
Otioseness: We wrote about “the ubiquitousness of smartphones” on Tuesday. The usual, and I think more elegant, word is “ubiquity”.
Commonality: The spread of the word “community” to mean any group of people who share a characteristic went too far a long time ago, so I will protest about an arbitrary recent example. After Wednesday’s US presidential debate we carried a – very good – fact-checking article from the Associated Press. But it did say that Trump’s view of Russia “is at odds with the prevailing position of the US intelligence community”.
Why not just say “the US intelligence services”?