Mea culpa: statement of the dead obvious

John Rentoul, our chief pedant, casts his eye over last week’s Independent

Age-old problem: an increasing population is creating grammatical glitches (PA)

In a picture caption on a front-page story about the projected rise in the UK’s population, we said: “Deaths are also projected to rise due to the relatively large number of people reaching older ages.” This was one of those cases where we didn’t really need a caption on a generic photo of a crowd of people, but it is our style, so we might as well use it to say something meaningful about the story that isn’t in the headline. Instead of phrasing “people are more likely to die as they get older” in a rather peculiar way.

The report itself included this piece of journalese – the special language used by journalists and no one else: “It comes amid ongoing concern about the public finances...” There was no “it” in the previous two paragraphs, which referred to “the figures” from the Office for National Statistics. So it should have been “they come”, but the whole sentence is made of prefabricated cliches never used in normal English. What we meant was “the projection is likely to deepen alarm about the public finances...” Perhaps we should have said that.

Frozen fish fingers: Two readers got in touch about another photo caption that was disconnected from the picture it purported to describe. In Monday’s Pictures of the Day, we said: “Festival visitors catch fish with their bare hands in a frozen river during the Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Festival in Hwacheon-gun, Gangwon Province, South Korea.”

The photo clearly showed people splashing about in a large paddling pool, with no ice in sight. I am told that tourists do catch fish with their hands through holes cut in the ice of the local river, but this was clearly a separate if related event, not involving ice (or river).

It’s alive! In a report of Rachel Reeves’s plans for growth, we said that “since the general election, the economy has flatlined”. The verb “to flatline” comes from medicine, referring to screens showing the vital signs of life: if the trace becomes a flat line, it means the patient is dead. We used it, as a lot of people do, to mean that the line showing GDP on a graph is flat – in other words, that national income has stayed the same. Better to say that “the economy has stagnated”. Despite Conservative hyperbole, this patient is not yet dead.

G-force: A football report on Wednesday said of Barcelona that “the average xG per shot against their goal of 0.13 is the highest in La Liga”. I thought it might refer to the force with which the ball is struck. Admittedly it took me only a few seconds to look it up on Google, and most readers, who are more football-literate than me, will know what it means. But it takes only two words to say “expected goals per shot” (presumably per shot on target), so we should do that.

Slice of Russia: I haven’t noticed this misheard word for a while, but Mick O’Hare spotted it in an article about territorial gains and losses in the Ukraine war: “Russia controls a little under 19 per cent of Ukraine, including the Crimean peninsula and parts of the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Ukraine controls a slither of the Russian border region of Kursk.” We meant “sliver”, a splinter or thin portion, rather than what snakes do. Let us hope we can bring this usage slithering to a halt…