Mea Culpa: What kind of goose was it, really?

When Fox News finally confirmed that Bill O’Reilly, its long-serving presenter who has been accused of sexually harassing colleagues, was leaving, we wrote: “There had been a flurry of reports that the Murdochs were preparing to let go of their golden goose.” Is it too petty to point out that, as far as we know, the goose that laid the golden eggs looked like a normal goose? Possibly. But the magic goose may have been white, grey or brown, but not gold.

Bear market: A similar complaint is sometimes made about Goldilocks. Recently we wrote about the markets believing that we are in a golden age: “good and widely spread growth, coupled with low inflation – a Goldilocks economy, not too hot and not too cold”. It is sometimes protested that it wasn’t Goldilocks’s porridge that was just the right temperature, but baby bear’s. I think that is petty. It was the porridge that Goldilocks ate, in a story to which she gives her name. The Goldilocks economy is fine.

It’s a gas: In a football report of the Manchester United game against Chelsea, we said: “Rashford out-gassed David Luiz with Cahill way in the rear-view mirror as he netted the opener.” A sentence that looks almost as if it might be in another language, it confused Philip Nalpanis, who wrote to ask if we meant “out-guessed”. We didn’t. We meant out-accelerated, using gas in the American sense. I was quite pleased to decipher it, but we should avoid words that are likely to catch readers out.