Mea Culpa: an infamous hail of rubber bullets

A lovely example of how journalese can lead to ambiguity in our news in brief section this week: “Police took down a man wielding a sword while ‘making threats’ outside a parade of shops in Essex with rubber bullets.” We can work out who was doing what after reading the sentence twice, but the reader should not be required to do that.

The sentence should say something like: “Police used rubber bullets to take down a man...”

Another report, on Donald Trump’s failure to attend an Armistice Day ceremony, showed the importance of commas. It started: “John Kerry, the former US secretary of state and Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson led the criticism...’ By missing the comma after “state”, it read as if Kerry is Sir Winston’s grandson.

Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for spotting both of those.

Go forth and divide: My campaign against the use of “multiple” instead of “several” or “many” receives support from reader Paul Edwards, who asks me to reissue my edict. Well, I tried to ban “Brexit” when it was coined in 2012, so my powers are limited.

This week, we wrote about “multiple suitcases”, “multiple narrators” and “multiple wildfires raging across California”, among multiple other uses. Some of these were in permissible forensic or medical contexts, such as “multiple stab wounds” and “multiple births”, but most were not. “Several” is a more natural word, and “many” is shorter.

Infamy, infamy: I was put out recently by the use of “famous”, which I think is always subtly insulting to the reader. Either the reader will know about the person or thing so described, or they will not, in which case using the word “famous” implies that they should.

This week we had a headline, “Rome mayor to rename streets that honour infamous fascists.” Again, I don’t think the adjective is needed – not because the reader has probably heard of fascists, but because the reader is probably capable of deciding whether or not they are a good thing.

Reading Martin Amis’s introduction to his father’s book, The King’s English (“King” was Kingsley Amis’s nickname), he recalls, “with a sincere moan of shame”, an occasion when he used the word. He wrote about F R Leavis’s “infamous crucifixion of C P Snow”, and his father commented: “You leave us in no doubt that you disapproved of it.”

The younger Amis thought, but did not say, “Actually, Dad, I thought infamous was just a cool new way of saying controversial.”