The Pedant Revolts – again

Two more silly errors from our supposed bastion of English language, the British Broadcasting Corporation.

1. “Lewis Hamilton has won his fourth successive Grand Prix in a row”. Logically he has therefore won five consecutive races, which is untrue. The second win would have been the first successive win, and so on. Or maybe the reporter meant “successful”, in which case the word “won” is redundant. In my view, a piece of avoidable tautology.

2. A report about the recent civil disturbance in Hong Kong. The police “flooded onto the road one by one”. I think the word we are looking for is “trickled”, rather than “flooded”. I believe “were deployed”, or even “arrived” would be a better description if that were the case, but I doubt if the “one by one” is a true depiction. I suspect they were deployed by the van-load.

We have enough issues nowadays with “fake news” without the BBC confusing the issue with “fake English”.