8 hours ago
Mea Culpa: I know why the caged metal bird won't sing
We had a wonderful mixed metaphor in a comment article about rich people allegedly fleeing the country to escape Rachel Reeves's clampdown on non-doms: 'The UK, once a favoured magnet for the world's billionaires and multimillionaires, has fallen off its perch.'
I tried to imagine a toy bird attached to a metal perch by a magnet, possibly a special kind of magnet 'favoured' by rich people, but it didn't work. Not only did we mix our metaphors, we overdid the first one. We meant that the UK had once been favoured by the world's mobile rich, or that it used to be a magnet for them, but both together was too much. In a bird cage.
Fission power: Sometimes it is fine to split an infinitive. In the headline, 'Trump lacks the strength to usefully wield US soft power,' hardly anyone would notice that 'to' and 'wield' have been separated. In another headline, however, it didn't work at all: 'After 30 years – it's time to again ask what women want.'
The natural rhythm there is 'to ask again'. Putting 'again' in the middle of 'to ask' is like when we write, as we sometimes do although I haven't seen it in the past week, 'the government on Saturday said…'
When oh when? On Wednesday, we compared the prime minister's approach to the European Court of Human Rights with his predecessor's handling of the European Union. The headline said: 'Why Keir Starmer risks making the same mistake as David Cameron when it comes to Europe.'
This is not wrong; it is just weak. 'When it comes to' is one of those phrases of verbal fluff that gives away a badly constructed sentence. What we meant was: 'Why Keir Starmer risks making the same mistake on Europe as David Cameron.'
Hanging by a thread: In an article about a woman's campaign to educate students about coercive control in relationships, we lost our thread. 'Now studying for a master's degree in sociology at the University of Cambridge, her petition, which has been signed by more than 105,000 participants, has received cross-party support and was delivered to No 10 on Monday afternoon.'
A natural reading is that the petition was studying for a master's degree. We broke it up into two sentences.
Bevvied: We wrote about the confusion caused by the Office for National Statistics when it announced the most recent consumer price inflation figure. It had admitted that the previous month's figure was wrong: it was 3.5 per cent and it should have been 3.4 per cent, but it wasn't going to go back to correct the official series. 'The decision not to correct was taken so as not to disrupt a bevvy of contracts linked to the CPI,' we said.
Thanks to Roger Thetford for pointing out that we meant 'bevy', a group, rather than 'bevvy', short for beverage, usually an alcoholic one.
It may be, however, that both words come from the same source, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. 'Bevy' dates from the 15th century as a collective noun for quails or ladies, it says, from Anglo-French bevée, of unknown origin. 'One supposed definition of the word is 'a drinking bout', but this perhaps is a misprint of bever (see beverage). If not, perhaps the original sense is birds gathered at a puddle or pool for drinking or bathing.'
The online dictionary comments: 'The quest for a clear and logical origin in such a word might be futile.'
Amid celebrations: Finally, let me pause my campaign against 'amid' to allow Mick O'Hare to praise a good and helpful use of the word. In our report of the Premier League fixtures for the 2025-26 season, we said: 'Arsenal have away trips to Manchester United and Liverpool in their first five fixtures, amid home ties against newly promoted Leeds, last season's revelation Nottingham Forest and Pep Guardiola's Manchester City.'
Amid? Used to mean 'in the middle of' and not just to bolt two parts of a sentence together? Alleluia.
