Mea Culpa: the fish-operated drones are coming for us

Questions of usage and style in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

Sharks have not yet evolved the facility to operate unmanned aerial vehicles (Getty)

We managed to make a shark scare story even more interesting by putting this headline on it: “British man alerts beachgoers to great white shark with drone.” This conjured up a vision of a shark operating a drone using a remote control, which was not what we intended. A little reordering was needed. Given that it is the Jaws storyline that grabs people’s attention, rather than the nationality of the alerter, we could have recast it thus: “Beachgoers alerted to great white shark by British man with drone.”

House call: The first sentence of a comment article that made the case for the NHS to go vegan read: “The first tenant of a healthcare professional or institution is ‘first, do no harm’.” We changed it to “tenet”, a medium-rare word that comes from the same Latin word, tenent, meaning “he holds”. “Tenant” means someone who holds property, whereas a tenet is a belief that someone holds.

Incidentally, I would have deleted “or institution”, an example of pointless and deadening elaboration.