Mea culpa: Showboating

Greta Thunberg’s trip to Israel might have ended in an unorthodox (for her) flight home, but it started on a boat. She was inbound on an aid mission organised by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which few think was ever intended to complete its delivery.

The story wasn’t straightforward and we added to the confusion by describing the vessel carrying Greta as a flotilla.

As Iain Boyd puts it, one boat doth not a flotilla make. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition started in 2010 as a group of ships aiming to break an Israeli naval blockade on Gaza. They’ve kept the name all these years, but they happened to send just one boat this time.

The activists shouldn’t bear the blame for the confusion over their title. We could have named the group correctly and made it clear to readers that there was only one boat involved.

Drinking it in: The stylish poet and author Joelle Taylor made our Pride list this year, so we dedicated part of her paragraph to a flattering account of her appearance. Eventually.

At first, we said she wears sharp tweed suits and has perfectly quaffed hair. Quaffed, referring to having drunk something, usually alcoholic, makes no sense here. We meant coiffed, as we later amended it.

Nuclear error: An editorial confused Three Mile Island, site of a 1979 nuclear accident, with Six Mile Bottom, a hamlet near Cambridge.

Pile-on: We said “Jason Isaacs has thrown his support onto Tom Felton” after the latter Harry Potter actor was criticised for his comments on JK Rowling’s transphobic views.

One usually throws one’s support behind someone, to back them up when they are faced with difficulty. However, throwing support onto someone sounds like it would only add to their burden.

Two for one: Regarding a development in the world of football, we said, “the new Club World Cup will quickly become a bi-annual tournament.” How often will that be, then?

The Independent’s style guide advises against using bi-annual, along with bi-monthly and bi-weekly, due to confusion over the frequency they are intended to describe. It’s advised that we instead write out what we mean except in the case of something happening every other year, where we can use biennial.

Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for pulling us up on this one. If I had to guess how often we make this mistake, I might say twice a week.

Oval and out: Philip also noticed a strange bit of wordplay in a picture caption on our story about Elon Musk conceding that he went too far when he, er, accused the president of being a paedophile. We ran a photo of Musk and Donald Trump’s parting embrace in the Oval Office (astonishingly, taken barely a fortnight ago) with the caption: “Just like starting oval.”

I’ve said before that the best puns bring together two related ideas in a play on a recognisable phrase. This pun does that, but it’s still not very good. It’s also been said before that we who write this column are guilty of the very things we criticise.