Mea Culpa: the old-fashioned Silvio Berlusconi

Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent, adjudicated by John Rentoul

Berlusconi in Rome in 2018 (AP)

In an assessment of the career of Silvio Berlusconi, who has died, we said that he was in power in Italy “before the refugee crisis became as acute as it did later, and thus Berlusconi’s brand of rightist authoritarianism lacked the sheer inhumanity of its contemporaries now”. That was a confusing use of “contemporaries”, because Forza Italia’s contemporaries were the people who were prominent in Italian or European politics at the same time (Latin con-tempus) as him, such as Tony Blair.

We meant his contemporary equivalents, people of similar politics who are around now, using contemporary to mean modern, “at the same time as us, now”. We changed it to say that his brand of rightist authoritarianism “lacked the sheer inhumanity of its present iteration”. All clear.

Dangerous witness: We had a rare case of double ambiguity in this sad story: “Ms Holland was hit by a police motorcyclist escorting the Duchess of Edinburgh along West Cromwell Road in southwest London. A witness said she was ‘thrown 40 feet across the road’ and, despite being rushed to hospital, died two weeks later.”