Mea Culpa: We’re all going on a journey – are we nearly there yet?

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Tripped up: Rebecca Long Bailey went on a ‘journey’ over Brexit (Getty)

Before the election last month, Rebecca Long Bailey (although she had a hyphen then) said she now favoured a second referendum on Brexit, and admitted she had “been on a journey”. A Blairite friend of mine muttered under his breath: “Not a long enough one.”

Just because Tony Blair called his memoir A Journey is no excuse for further metaphorical uses of the word. We had some silly examples last week, such as the “journey of renewal” being undertaken by national parks; “people’s journey into extremism”; and someone’s “journey from pregnancy to taking her child to pre-school for the first time”.

Time to arrive at the destination and never use it again.

Semi-mythical top bloke: The use of the word “legend” to mean all-round top person, such as one who has just lent you a pen or something, is a fine addition to the English language. But I was brought up short by a travel feature on Bonn, which mentioned Beethoven House, “a memorial and museum honouring the musical legend”.

Ludwig was a well-documented real person rather than a semi-mythical person from ancient history, so I think we were looking for a word such as “giant”.

Long story: We used an antique phrase in our analysis of the struggle between Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, and Donald Trump over the president’s power to wage war.

In rehearsing the history of attempts by congress to curtail the president’s power to order military action, we said: “The Obama administration attempted to eke out an exception to the rule that US forces could continue to participate in the Nato air raids in Libya for more than 60 days.”

To “eke out” is an unusual phrase meaning “make last longer by using frugally”, but we got into trouble by applying it to something as abstract as an exception to a rule. It is hard enough to follow the idea of making an exception last longer by using it as little as possible – and I suspect that what the writer meant was stretching the exception to apply it to things it wasn’t originally meant to cover – but we then got into a muddle about what was the rule and what was the exception.

I think the rule is the War Powers Act 1973, which says the president may order US armed forces into action without a congressional declaration of war under specific conditions. Therefore the exception would be that congress allowed US forces to take part in air raids in Libya “for more than 60 days”.

That was a sentence that needed to be rewritten, and the eking out, which was either wrong or beside the point, dropped altogether.