Mea Culpa: Rhyme or reason

Susanna Richards peers deep into the darkness of last week’s Independent

Subtle diplomacy: there are more effective ways to negotiate peace than by writing poems (Getty)

We were hoist by our own autocorrect in an analysis of the prospects of an end to the conflict in Ukraine. It could have been the fault of a dictation machine, I suppose, but either way, the intervention was far from helpful.

“Europe’s main concerns are protecting Ukraine and developing the military capacity to scare Putin away from his oft-spoken desire to force former Soviet-sphere nations in Eastern Europe back into Russia’s portfolio,” we said. “That’s much harder to focus on if, as Putin and Trump want, diplomatic and poetical effort is diverted into quibbles over fake ceasefires rather than winning the war against Russia.”

I’m sure it wasn’t our intention to imply that the parties in question were conducting negotiations through the medium of verse, but that is the kind of thing that our friendly neighbourhood robot would not understand. Which is endearing in a way, but still exasperating. It was corrected (by a person) to say “political”.

Of ravens and writing desks: Not really ravens, as such, because there is generally no controversy about how to spell that. So in one sense, at least, the two things are not alike at all. This is about bureaus… or bureaux, as sharp-eyed reader Henry Peacock wrote to inform us it should probably be spelt.

He might be right. Or he might not. It’s one of those plurals whose spelling seems to be subject to the whim of whoever writes a particular stylebook, because there is no obvious consensus among these quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. The Guardian, for instance, specifies bureaus for furniture and bureaux for organisations, while The Times prescribes bureaux de change but “prefer[s] bureaus for writing desks and distant newspaper offices”, which is rather, well, poetic [If you say so – Ed].

The BBC does not express a view, and neither do our friends across the pond at the Associated Press. However, it is clear that the “x” version is the most common in British English, and the “s” in American, so, at least in the context of an office, I think we should go with the “x”.

Trading places: Talking of transatlantic matters, we became significantly muddled in an editorial last week that addressed the impact of tariffs. “Inevitably, as Britain’s second-largest trading partner, a major holder of dollar-denominated assets and a leading investor in the US, when America catches a cold, the British tend to get pneumonia,” we wrote. As Roger Thetford helpfully pointed out, “The attempt to squeeze too many ideas into a single sentence has left Britain apparently trading with itself.” Not such a bad idea, perhaps, in the circumstances.

Spot the difference: Reader John Harrison alerted us to what looked like a riddle in an article about parking fines. “Excel Parking did not provide a response, while Euro Car Parks did not respond to requests for a comment,” we said at the end of our report. As Mr Harrison noted, the use of “while” to connect these pieces of information suggested that the two outcomes might have been different. We could just have said that neither company responded to us.

Miner infringement: We published a report about the candidates in the forthcoming Australian election and their opposing positions on fuel. “But for Dutton, a former cop with a hardline image he’s now trying to shake, the US president’s vociferous decline in popularity has made this brand of Trump-lite politics especially challenging to pull off,” we wrote. Vociferous, essentially, means noisy; I think the word we were looking for was vertiginous, which means steep, but to be on the safe side it was changed to “recent”.

The rest of the article said what it meant to, more or less, though I was prompted to raise my other eyebrow when we wrote: “In a speech late last year, Dutton promised Rinehart and many of the country’s biggest miners that his government would ‘be the best friend the resource sector in Australia will ever have’.” The image this evoked of a not-untall politician being towered over by some inordinately large coal miners was quite amusing, but amusement is not our aim (well, not in news reports, at least), so we tweaked it to say “mining companies”.

Bearing witness: An article about a memoir published by the mother of two famous singers featured some syntactic disarray. “As the ‘Mama Bear’ who instilled such fierce feminism and Black pride in her daughters, it’s fascinating to read Knowles’ openhearted and insightful account ...”, we wrote, unwittingly giving the impression that the writer herself was the “Mama Bear” in question.

The device we were trying to deploy is known as a fronted adverbial. It is a favourite of obituary writers, though I don’t know why (perhaps it helps take their minds off the melancholy). What it means is that you put your adverbial phrase (the part that says how, or why, or to what extent something was done) at the beginning of the sentence rather than later on. But sometimes, as in this instance, it can go a bit wrong.

As a rule it is probably best avoided, as even when used correctly it can distract the reader: it is only once they have scrambled over the adverbial clause that they are able to discover its context. In general I think it is a good idea to first set out the what rather than the how or the why (unless you are a poet, of course, in which case anything goes).

On that note, I shall leave you to contemplate such whys and wherefores (which, as many of you will know, are roughly the same thing) or I shall be, to quote a certain poem, here for evermore. Until next time.