Mea Culpa: The powerful magic of the hyphen and the lower-case ‘e’

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

Saturday 03 September 2022 21:54 BST
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JRR Tolkien, an academic and philologist, called his imagined world Middle-earth
JRR Tolkien, an academic and philologist, called his imagined world Middle-earth (Alamy)

This is one of those bits of pedantry that really shouldn’t matter at all, and yet it does. We got it right everywhere except in a short headline on our front page, which greeted The Rings of Power, the Lord of the Rings prequel, with: “Welcome back to Middle Earth.”

JRR Tolkien called his world “Middle-earth” (hyphen, lower-case “e”), and so we should, too. Many of the enthusiasts for Tolkien’s work (and/or its CGI-enhanced visualisations) care passionately about every detail, and they will mark us down as amateurs if we fail to conform. We have been warned.

Missing the boat: We reported that the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales had “broken down off the south coast shortly after embarking for exercises in the US”. Thanks to Paul Edwards for pointing out that to embark means to get on to a ship – or a plane – or to put someone or something on a ship or plane. It is from the French em-, “in”, and barque, “ship, bark”, and the opposite is “disembark”. We meant to say that the ship was “departing” for exercises in, or more probably off, the US.

Wrestlemania: Linda Beeley wrote to ask if we were right to say: “Trump still believes he’ll be able to wrestle back power.” If we meant “take back forcefully”, would the normal word not be “wrest”? I think it used to be, but it is rather old-fashioned now, and as “wrestle” is the frequentative form of the same word – that is, it describes repeated attempts to wrest, which originally meant twist or tighten – I think the way we used it was fine.

How big?: In our report of the unusual weather last week, we said that a baby had been killed by “a four-inch hailstone the size of an orange”. Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for spotting this odd mix of the precise and the comparative. As he said, four inches would be the size of an extremely large orange, and more like a grapefruit.

He also noted that later in the article there was a reference to “the possibility of hailstones over 2cm”. We seem to be mixing inches, centimetres and doubtful homely analogies.

Our style is to use metric measurements, except when pre-metric British ones are more familiar to most of our (British) readers. If in doubt, we should at least be consistent within one article. And although comparing things to oranges, grapefruit or double-decker buses can be useful, I think most people have a good idea how big a four-inch – or even a 10cm – hailstone is.

Long time C: In an opinion article about the political effects of the energy crisis, we wrote: “If the Resolution Foundation is right, Britons are going to experience the greatest decline in living standards in a century that included World War Two, the great depression and the financial crisis.”

Thanks to Julian Self for drawing my attention to this use of “century” to mean “a period of 100 years”. It could cause the reader to pause to work out that it doesn’t mean either “the 20th century” or “the 21st century”, which might be what they expected. This isn’t helped by listing past declines in living standards out of chronological order.

Finally, our style is “Second World War”, for the sake of consistency. So the whole thing has been recast thus: “Britons are going to experience the greatest decline in living standards in 100 years, a period that included the great depression, the Second World War and the financial crisis.”

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