As the new year heaves into view – in fact that should be “hove into view” given we are four days into 2015 – is it possible to eschew resolutions in favour of a revolution? I mean, let’s make it the year we do away with some of the Guardian’s more persistent errors, like the misuse of heave and hove, which it managed at least three times last year. Here is one correction from 18 June 2014:
“A review of Lana Del Rey’s latest album said her debut, Born to Die, sold 12m copies. That album has sold 7m copies. The review also used the phrase ‘our old friend the red dress hoves into view’. That should have been ‘heaves’. As our style guide points out, hove is the ‘past tense and past participle of heave used in a nautical context, literally or metaphorically’ (Change the subject, 13 June, page 22, G2).”
There are millions of reasons to get millions right, not to mention billions and trillions too, although we too often don’t. This correction was on 19 November: “Our figures were out by several digits when we gave totals for Camelot’s ticket sales, prize outlay and amount given to good causes in a feature about the national lottery. In the first half of this financial year Camelot sold tickets worth £3.47bn (not £3,469,800), handed out £1.93bn (not £1,926,200) in prizes and gave £868m (not £867,710) to good causes. In addition, the article said that in the Belgian lottery the same six numbers came up in draws on 6 and 10 September 2009. In fact that occurred in Bulgaria (Get lucky!, 18 November, page 10, G2).”
Mathematical errors are one of our persistent failings in general. On 17 December: “We were two digits out when we said that senior government clerics in Egypt had put the number of atheists in the country at 866 and that this represented roughly 0.00001% of the population. Egypt’s population is estimated at about 87,000,000, so 866 is roughly 0.001% (Egypt counts up its atheists: 866 precisely, 13 December, page 29).”
It makes life tough for readers, as one reminded us about a story published on 14 July: “Yet again I find the confusing (for the considerable proportion of the population which is mathematically challenged) mixture of two different measures in a comparison: four in 10 Londoners are from an ethnic minority compared with 11% of Met officers.”
There was a particular rash of misusing lead for led in the past year. On 24 January: “Led astray, yet again: one of the most frequent errors to appear on these pages cropped up once more in a food blog (The great goat’s cheese shortage of 2014, 20 January, theguardian.com) when it referred to ‘poor weather last winter, which lead to lower production’.”
In a year when we are due to hear a great deal more about “English votes for English laws” it would be helpful to improve our knowledge about the rest of the UK and continental Europe. For a news organisation with an internationalist outlook, we regularly confuse the institutions of the Council of Europe and European Union. On 4 January we carried this correction: “Not for the first time, we have confused the European court of human rights and the EU. A headline in yesterday’s paper was wrong to say the EU had delivered a ruling on whole-life jail sentences (PM backs 100-year jail sentences to avoid EU ruling on whole-life tariffs, page 9). The European court of human rights, which ruled last year that whole-life terms without any prospect of release or review amount to inhuman and degrading treatment, is not an EU institution. It was established under the European convention on human rights and is overseen by the Council of Europe.”
Nearer to home, the Guardian still occasionally refers to Wales as a principality and – please – don’t call Irish people British, as outlined in this correction published on 22 March: “An article (US authors take the prizes, but Brits are still pushing literary boundaries, 15 March, page 12) implied that the novelists John Banville and John Boyne are British. Both are Irish.”
Major errors? No. Individually, they are minor irritations. However, the accretion of such errors, like barnacles on a ship’s hull, makes the readers’ passage sluggish and tiring. Hopefully we can encourage a smoother journey in 2015.
