Mea culpa: a report on the Syria crisis doesn’t add up
John Rentoul’s regular round-up of errors and omissions
We managed to bend the laws of economics and mathematics in a report of the crisis in Syria, in which we said: “The Syrian pound hit a record low of 3,100 to the dollar, meaning since January alone it has lost over three times its value.” Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for pointing out that this implies the pound is now worth a negative amount.
Looking up the currency markets online, I see that the Syrian pound was trading at about 1,000 to the dollar
in January, so the number of pounds you can buy with a dollar has tripled. In other words, the Syrian pound has lost two thirds of its value.
Forward and back: It is a failing of mine that I can never work out which is “the former” and which is “the latter”. For me, it is like not being able to tell my left from my right. So I think good writing avoids those backward references where possible. Last week, an article about Amy Levy, the Victorian Jewish poet, showed the sort of trouble they can get us into.
The author thanked Levy “for battling to write and to escape marriage” and said: “It is thanks to women like her that I get to live in a world where I can do the former, with almost no pressure to do the latter.” That sentence doesn’t work, because I think the author means that she feels no pressure to marry, whereas what she says is that she is under no pressure to escape marriage.
Loss of face: We referred to “face masks” 20 times last week, which is 40 words where 20 would do. A mask is used on the face (unless we are talking about specialist terms in photography or printing, where by analogy it can mean a piece of card used to cover a part of an image that is not required). So top marks to Simon Calder, Borzou Daragahi, Patrick Kingsley and Andrew Woodcock for calling them just “masks”.
And a mark deducted for any reporter who wrote about masks being required on public transport, when the legislation stipulates “face coverings”, which can include scarves or what Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, once referred to as “face cloths”.
Bending it: A reader has been in touch to take issue with the phrase “taking the knee”, which she thinks is ugly. I am afraid that this column’s authority does not extend to dictating how people beyond the pages of The Independent use their language. People call it “taking the knee”. It is a specific gesture, so to call it “kneeling” or, worse, “genuflecting”, would be to change its meaning. It is called “taking the knee” and that is all there is to it.