Now that much of the BBC’s output is read and not heard, the Corporation has had to beef up its backroom skills as required in the newspaper industry. At least, that’s what it should have done …
The skier Dave Ryding’s recent announcement of his retirement plans prompted Chemmy Alcott to say or write that his legacy would ‘supersede’ his results. The intended meaning of this strange choice of words may be obscure, but at least she spelt the word correctly … as whoever composed the headline failed to do.
Sloppy.
Then we had this classic schoolboy howler in the BBC’s story of the lucky woman who missed the doomed Air India flight to London because of a traffic jam: ‘After arriving at the airport less than an hour before departure, airline staff turned her away.’
Nor was the BBC News headline – ‘Iran launches fresh air strikes on Israel’ – the happiest choice. Fresh air strikes, or non-strikes, not always owned up to, belong on the golf course.
The suggestion that BBC headlines are composed by AI is reinforced by the apparently automatic use of the word ‘stun’ whenever the favourite in a competitive encounter fails to achieve victory. Surely a human subeditor would look for an alternative word once in a while? I like underdogs as much as the next man, but find myself increasingly drawn to support the favourite, to save the irritation of yet another ‘stun’ headline.
It goes without saying that no one of sound mind would apply the stun word to the unexpected result of a boxing match. BBC did, however: ‘Briton Yafai stunned by Rodriguez in first pro loss.’ The unfortunate Briton had not been knocked out, but had he been stunned, or merely defeated?
Wimbledon fortnight is prime time for stunwatch. Day 1 was mercifully stun-light, although the bugbear word crept in to the report of home hopeful Arthur Fery’s surprise win against the seeded Popyrin. Could it be that someone at the BBC has woken up to the problem? That would indeed be The Genuine Stunning.
On which subject, hasn’t the time come for the BBC to ditch its fuddy duddy spelling of the weapon we use for the game, assuming we remember to bring it to the court, as Coco Gauff charmingly didn’t in Paris? The juxtaposition of the BBC’s report of this oversight and the image of Coco’s note to self, with its awareness that fruit salad, like cut flowers, is an exercise in arrangement, only drew attention to the BBC’s outdated usage.
Coco Gauff later posted a picture on X that showed she had forgotten to tick ‘put tennis racquets in bag’ off her to-do list
By what right does the BBC change the spelling of what she wrote, inside quote marks? If she had written ‘Turn off the faucet’, would they have changed that to tap? A quote is a quote, and should not be tampered with.