First, credit where it is due: Channel 4 News had a terrific story last night about the scandal of hospital building funded by the so-called private finance initiative (PFI) programme, with the focus of this exclusive tale on the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.

PFI seems to resemble a bit of a wheeze in which public hospitals got built very quickly, making politicians such as Gordon "Referendum Resurrection" Brown look incredibly brilliant, clever and caring; and their private financiers continue to get rewarded handsomely over decades from taxpayers' money, making them look incredibly brilliant, clever, rich, grasping and greedy.

The "furniture" on a story has a job to do, whether on the interweb or newsprint. A headline should draw the reader in, being eye-catching and full of SEO (search engine optimisation/sexy exceptional oohs) goodies.

A good standfirst will give a bit more context, and the byline and any accompanying mugshot will reassure that here is someone I like reading and trust - a no-brainer in the case of the excellent Cathy Newman.

So then we come to the crossheads (type centred) or sideheads (type set left): the mini-headlines or, if you prefer, large bits of text that break up chunks of copy, tell you what's coming in the next few paragraphs and should encourage you to read on. Should.

I think this story is so good that little coaxing is needed to read on. But whoever wrote the unbelievably dull and jargon-rich "Ongoing investigation" in this sidehead needs to go on a refresher course.

We old-school subs are programmed to replace "ongoing" with "continuing" in all circumstances. "Ongoing investigation" is pure essence of plodspeak. Just because most of the Old Bill, as my detective father used to tell me about his colleagues, can't speak or write proper English in public does not mean that journalists have to regurgitate their mangled notions, especially in sideheads.

Maybe something like "Fire safety fears" would have been a little more to the point.

I have to sort out - as in viciously and unmercifully cut - plenty of management-speak in the commercial copy that I edit. It goes with the territory, and I am happy to do it.

You really wouldn't want to hire me for financial advice, as I'm almost a complete klutz in the investment department. In turn, I don't expect too much from business types when they try to write. They pay me to make their jargon-rich nonsense fit for human consumption - and so perhaps more likely to persuade someone to buy their message and their brand or product.

What is almost unforgivable is when people who should know better - journalists, broadcasters, lawyers, politicians, advertising copywriters and academics - insist on persisting with the linguistic redundancies of the commercial classes.

I have a number of bêtes noires, and among them are "going forward" and "moving forward". The redundant use of these phrases has reached global epidemic proportions.

They do not need to be banned. They are perfectly acceptable, for example, in commentaries for any sport where territory is gained with possession of the ball or its equivalent, such as football ("soccer"), rugby union, rugby league, (field) hockey, (ice) hockey and American football (ritualised violence with side-effects including head injuries, buggered-up knee ligaments and domestic abuse).

That leaves a vast arena where permanent exclusion of these management-speak favourites is essential. In a metaphorical sense, "going forward" and "moving forward" imply something that is going to happen. The future is being talked of. So, logically, they become redundant when, say, a tense points to the future or when a noun or verb - plan, prospect, hope etc - looks ahead.

I had a bizarre exchange on Twitter a few months ago (below) when I tried to make this rather simple point to someone at the illustrious Brookings Institution think tank. (This was, by definition, a public conversation, so I have no hesitation in reporting it here.)

I had no idea that, more than 30 years after I bailed out of academe into what many would consider to be the more turbulent and intellectually shallow waters of journalism, my mental flabber would be somewhat gasted.

As a pedant of a scientific bent, I'm seizing this eve-of-Scottish-referendum moment to try to explain - simply, I trust - the basics of opinion polls, specifically sample size and accuracy.

For an opinion poll to be believable, at least two conditions must be fulfilled.

First, the people being polled - the sample - must be representative of the wider population as far as possible, on criteria such as anno domini and gender. Or, as we self-appointed wags like to say, appropriately broken down by age and sex. This is known in the political polling trade - psephology - as "weighting".

Second, the sample needs to be of sufficient size to tease out any significant trend in the sample, and hence the population. Hold on to your school desks, children, as I take you through this tiny step by step.

It is logical that the smaller the sample, the dodgier the conclusion. If I have a crowd of representative Scots crammed on to a football pitch and ask only the bloke on one of the penalty spots for his voting intentions in the #indyref, I may conclude that there will be a 100 per cent Yes, No or Don't Know result when the referendum refs blow their whistles for full time tomorrow night.

The trick with sampling is to poll the smallest number of people you need to get a meaningful - that is, "statistically significant" - result. Asking a million people for their opinion when you only need to ask 10,000 will waste time and money. So far, so bleeding obvious.

Now for the tiny bit of maths. The magic phrase to grasp is "1 over the square root of n". That is how you calculate how much you can trust the result of an opinion poll, where n is the size of the sample: what pollsters call the error.

Suppose, foolishly, you poll only nine people from your sample on the simple Yes/No question "Do you ever wear a kilt?" and don't allow any Don't Knows. You calculate the error as 1 divided by the square root of  9; that is, 1 divided by 3. So the error is 1/3 - a third, or 33.33333 etc per cent. Not much Kop, in footballing parlance, and deserving of a statistical yellow card.

Most reputable polling organisations go for samples of 1,000 - in which case, the error is about 1/32, around 3.1 per cent - or spend more for samples of 1,500 (error about 2.5 per cent), or even 2,000 (error about 2.2 per cent).

So if I can poll a weighted sample of 1,000 in Sutherland, my favourite rural destination in Scotland, and 73 per cent say they sometimes wear a kilt, I can be confident I have obtained a statistically significant result.

The calculated error of 3.1 per cent suggests that my figure for kilt wearers could be as small as about 70 per cent or as high as 76 per cent. The 27 per cent figure for those who say they never wear a kilt could be as high as 30 per cent or as low 24 per cent. The difference between the two responses is said to be "statistically significant" and I can have high confidence I am not talking sporran-adjacent nonsense.

I hope this explains why there can be controversy when a sample size in an opinion poll about #indyref voting intentions is only 500, with an error of about 4.5 per cent. If I obtain a 54-46 split from my sample, the ranges can be 58 to 50, and 42 to 50, respectively. I cannot have great confidence that I am sampling anything other than error in my methodology.

Anyway, come Friday morning, the opinion polls and their sampling errors will be ancient history because - as we all know in that politician's cliché - it's only the real vote that counts. Until the next opinion poll, anyway.
 

While a news story should always correctly answer the curiosity of readers about the who, what, when, how and why, they can get especially irritated if the where is wrong.

The slightest error about local geography can prompt a flurry of complaints. Often there are nuances about which street is in, say, the hypothetical town of Seaville and which in its dock area, Seaport, that only locals can discern.

A distant journalist at a newspaper office in London, with only an online map for guidance and a deadline five minutes away, can be on a hiding to nothing.

So some geographical faux pas are more understandable than others. This recent example, openly confessed by the Guardian, is particularly bizarre.

St Pancras station is only six minutes' walk from the newspaper's office, which is just over the London borough border at Kings Place, in Islington. I think. At least, according to the red dotted line on Google Maps.

Beginners, start here. Yes, that's something of a tautology.

One of the many tasks of the proper subeditor/copy editor is, to use the technical term, cut the crap.

It may be invidious to pick out an individual. John Harris, of the Guardian, is merely another of the countless exponents of "added bonus".

A bonus is "an extra and unexpected advantage", says the Oxford. Since the meanings of "added" and "extra" are synonymous, young JH could have saved himself five keystrokes by simply writing "bonus". And many more in future if he follows my advice for most of the times that he writes "bonus".

Deliberate deployment of tautology is best left for the poetic, eg, the "bosky wood" of Rupert Brooke.

Tautology is likely to be a recurring theme in these pages. One of my favourites is "ruling military junta", which can invariably be rendered accurately as "junta". Well done, the Wall Street Journal and no end of others. 

My attempts to stop literals popping up in copy that I have subbed mean I'm a day late to this particular mock-the-Daily-Mail party.

But comparison of the first (top) and second (above) versions of the shouty WOB (white-on-black) furniture serves as a painful reminder to all of us handling the written word in a rush: there is a universal rule of journalism that stories about illiteracy are subject to typo karma.

And of course I've read these few lines through a ridiculously obsessive number of times because I know I'm in danger of overlooking my own typos or worse.

Oddly, I have often been asked by journalist colleagues to express an opinion on matters of taste.

I say oddly because I have a great love of bawdy humour, the double entendre and the inappropriate. Part of my inner world is governed by a 10-year-old's glee at the comic absurdity of bodily functions. Yes, I still find farting funny.

This appreciation of things not always de rigueur in the politest circles was established in my childhood. My detective father and teacher mother shared a love of reading and storytelling, but always with a eye for detail.

He often went to post-mortems, scenes of armed robberies and to courts; infant pupils would innocently divulge family secrets to her, such as "My daddy pays money to the horses... My daddy fell over the television set when he came home last night." At times like those, if you didn't laugh you might cry.

I was so relieved as a teenage wannabe intellectual to discover Chaucer through O-level English literature, television adaptations and the theatre.

His wonderful observations on human behaviour in The Canterbury Tales, written 600 years ago in colourful Middle English, seemed to legitimise what I found funny. My favourite, involving a ladder and an ill-advised kiss in the dark at a window, is The Miller's Tale.

I fantasise that had I been born 30 years earlier I might have been able to ply my trade as a scriptwriter for the Carry On films.

Making jokes about the state of the world can be a hazardous occupation. My memory of the various attempts at humour right after 9/11 is that they were, without exception, terribly misjudged, hopelessly mistimed, not funny, and often plain sick.

As a gentile boy growing up in east London, I had many Jewish friends and for me Jewish humour is among the best. I know there are very dark jokes about the Holocaust. Would I tell them? Apart from as illustrations of the depth of Jewish humour, no. Context and the teller are sometimes all.

And so I come to today's pocket cartoon by Matt for the Telegraph. I think he never fails to display his two core skills magnificently: a wonderful ability to draw distinctively, and an innate instinct for finding the hilarious in the news. You know it's a Matt without seeing the logo.

In 13 words this morning, he walks the tightrope of making a combined joke about terrorism and the Scottish independence referendum. In my opinion, it is in the best possible taste, a work of genius. And it is incredibly witty.

Enjoy more of Matt in his Telegraph archive.

The Mirror is the self-styled "intelligent tabloid" that deploys the hashtag #madeuthink. The daily is the home of Kevin Maguire; its Sunday sister has another Kevin, O'Sullivan. They are two of the most engaging, entertaining and intellectually coherent red-top talents in the land.

Today they are not well served by the choice of the word "miracle" in the daily organ's splash headline and copy.

Michael Schumacher, the German former Formula 1 champion and erstwhile target of Mirror opprobrium, suffered life-threatening injuries in a high-speed off-piste skiing accident last December.

Miracle has a variety of meanings, as the Oxford dictionary records. Its usage may or may not suggest some divine agency is thought to have been involved in an event.

The Mirror's account today refers to "the miracle fans had prayed for", so there is more than a hint of unverifiable action by some supernatural entity.

People talk, sometimes loosely, sometimes with religious fervour, about events being "miracles" and "miraculous". Journalists really ought to be a little more careful about tapping into such a theistic mindset for their reportage and story presentation.

Tabloids have long been fond of invoking the spooky woo factor. As far as I am aware, no deities have been available for interview about the plight of Schumacher. Any rational reporter might be asking why, if this new development is a miracle, there was not a miracle that prevented the ghastly accident in the first place.

The only obvious interventions by intelligent beings in this Schumacher saga have been those of the emergency services, doctors, nurses and other medical staff, and his family, friends and entourage.

People have accidents. Some accidents are worse than others. Some healthcare is excellent, some dire. Some people die of seemingly trivial conditions. Some people survive major trauma. There is a global statistics industry that measures, records and analyses such results, and recommends whether there should be changes to medical practice. I suspect Schumacher has had outstanding care in centres of excellence that are geared up for complex, potentially deadly, neurological skiing injuries.

Maybe I am expecting too much of an "intelligent tabloid" to ditch the airy-fairy hocus-pocus, concentrate on the evidence and thus be radically different from its folk-religionist rivals. Dear Mirror, look at yourself. And with more faith than charity, I live in hope of your redemption.

My least happy time professionally was way back in the 1980s on contract as a subeditor on sport at the Daily Telegraph. The Berry family management was as weak as old maid's water, the print unions all powerful.

Only the journalists, many shockingly underpaid given their talent, actually seemed interested in getting the paper out. Morale among the foot soldiers seemed decidedly low, albeit tempered by the presence of the legendary Bill Deedes, who had an increasingly impossible job as editor.

I discovered over a pint or two that one of the most experienced, if occasionally volatile, subs in the sport department - a lovely, melancholic and somewhat cynical man called Colin Hook, sadly no longer with us - was on about £16,000 a year. "Hooky" was reputed to have left the Sun after defenestrating a typewriter at its old Bouverie Street office.

This walking encyclopaedia of, among other things, boxing was rewarded with about two thirds of the salary of a drunken, rather dim, messenger who only had to pick up bits of paper from the chief sub's trays and put them somewhere else, but often failed.

Hot metal was dying in Fleet Street. Wapping, the "new technology" diaspora and the loss of thousands of typesetting and composing jobs were imminent.

In hindsight, the experience I gained at the Telegraph then was invaluable. And I was able to witness Deedes coming into the sports room on the night of May 25, 1985, and calmly inquiring in his distinctive voice: "Who have we got in Brusshels?"

The Heysel Stadium disaster that night killed 39 football fans. Donald Saunders*, the football correspondent, whose copy was always a joy to sub, filed magnificently.

The Telegraph's sports coverage continues to shine. Paul Hayward has truly followed the fine Saunders tradition. I am a West Ham supporter, albeit of the armchair variety; Bobby Moore remains one of my heroes; and I look forward to reading my former Times colleague Matt Dickinson's account of the flawed World Cup-winning England captain in full.

So it's appreciation almost all round. I just can't understand how the modern Telegraph team can allow "apprectiate" to slip through in a standfirst above such a well-written and edited Hayward piece about the Dickinson book.

*PS I note the Saunders obituary, published in 2008, suggests the Heysel disaster happened in 1986. Oh dear.
   

The Daily Express has an open obsession with the late Diana, Princess of Wales, as noted by SubScribe passim.

I suppose it was inevitable that the tabloid with the retro crusader logo would publish yet another yarn on the day it was announced that her older son Prince William's second child was on the way.

Perhaps the excitement of the moment got the better of the mighty Express "news" machine. Anyway, someone forgot that, like the animals entering the Ark, quotation marks normally go two by two.

And despite the much vaunted richness of the English language, the intro has an unfortunate dead metaphor plonked right after the death threats: "Princess Diana sent chilling death threats to Camilla Parker-Bowles in the dead of the night, an explosive new book has claimed."

Yes, of course I'm utterly convinced the wording is knowing, deliberate and carefully thought through.

PS Er, Parker Bowles is not hyphenated. I haven't got the willpower to read the second par yet.

PPS Authoritative reference tip: for the royalty-obsessed, Debrett's is not a bad place to check these things.