Factual Errors

When they’re not making mistakes in their English, they’re getting their facts wrong.

Strangely, this writer (Sunday Times Lifestyle, 24 Feb 2008) didn’t seem to notice that the letters ‘UCL’ don’t spell ‘University of London’ (i.e. UOL):

That’s because ‘UCL’ stands for ‘University College London’ (which is a college of the UOL).

Her colleague, on the other hand, is seemingly so overwhelmed by a list of three disciplines (‘philosophy, economics, politics’) that she naïvely assumes her interviewee, the Indian writer Vikram Seth, must have done multiple degrees (Sunday Times Lifestyle, 24 Feb 2008):


The PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) is, in fact, a single degree at Oxford.