Mea Culpa: A subject lesson

Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent, delivered from a rough sea by Susanna Richards

Saturday 25 March 2023 14:10 GMT
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Some Belgian aeronauts being subjected to assistance by British sailors in about 1880
Some Belgian aeronauts being subjected to assistance by British sailors in about 1880 (Getty)

In a comment piece about the dangers surrounding a bank collapse, we wrote: “So, in rapid fashion, we’ve seen Silicon Valley Bank, Signature, Credit Suisse and First Republic all subjected to rescues and bailouts.” This use of “subjected” poses a question: should we instead have written “subject”? I think so, and I’ll tell you why.

These two very similar words are often mixed up, but they are not always interchangeable. The word “subject”, when it is not being a noun or a verb, can often be seen performing as an adjective in the phrase “subject to”, which means “affected by” or “conditional on”. “Subjected to”, on the other hand, is a phrasal verb, and it means that whatever has happened, it was actively done to the person or thing being discussed. Thus it is commonly used in the context of an unwelcome intervention, and can imply negativity all by itself, as in “I was subjected to a visit from my favourite aunt.”

It’s true that, in the example above, the bailouts were “done to” the banks. But we can presume that they wanted to be rescued – leaving aside the unwelcomeness of the situation that demanded it – and so the use of “subjected” seems anomalous. Short of recasting the sentence entirely, we ought to have changed it to the neutral-sounding “subject”.

Verb your enthusiasm: In an interesting opinion piece about the overproliferation of “immersive” art, which always sounds to me about as enjoyable as being held under water, we said: “The theatre company Punchdrunk has settled in a vast 100,000 sq ft space in Woolwich that homes their sprawling production of The Burnt City, based on the Trojan War.” I had to read that twice, and still wasn’t sure why “homes” had been used instead of the usual “houses”. Perhaps it is a newer example of a noun-to-verb transition, in which case I naturally disapprove.

There was another of these further on in the article, where we wrote: “Light exhibitions of the great works of Salvador Dali or Frida Kahlo might springboard us into the hallucinatory heart and essence of their creations.” Being springboarded sounds like another unpleasant experience, which tends to support the author’s argument. But I can think of some actual verbs we could have been subjected to instead.

Cutting a dash: It was decided some time ago that we would no longer apply hyphens to the phrase “cost of living crisis”. The feeling was that it was becoming such a commonly used term that the hyphens were unnecessary, and given the financial climate I could hardly argue (the price of punctuation has gone up too, I am told). But even if I’d rather we still used them in our compound adjectives, it’s a bit much to bung them in willy-nilly where they’re not supposed to be.

“The war in Ukraine, a global pandemic, soaring cost-of-living and inflation – these were all combining to make investors jittery,” we wrote. The investors weren’t the only ones. The cost of living is a noun, not an adjective, in this context, and as such it needed a “the” before “soaring”, and absolutely neither of those hyphens. Back in the drawer, please, to be homed elsewhere.

US and them: We published an outstanding account of one correspondent’s experiences during the Iraq war, but in editing it we omitted to transpose some of the North American terminology into British. Phrases such as “a quarter million people” or “got a hold of” are easy enough for a UK audience to understand, but others can be a hindrance to comprehension.

“The boys from the exurbs of Phoenix or Gary, Indiana were crude and disrespectful,” we wrote, describing the way some soldiers had behaved towards Iraqi civilians. I went to look up “exurb” and found that it is a US word meaning the (often wealthy) areas beyond a city’s suburbs. It was coined in the 1950s, apparently, but is still classed as American, US dialect, or “specialised” by the online dictionaries I consulted. As such I think it’s unfair to expect our UK readers to have encountered it, and we should probably have changed it to something more familiar.

James, James: We reported last week that “the King had remarked on how loud the sentries were at St James’ Palace in the mornings”. I shouldn’t complain that it’s hard to remember, because we can always look it up, but there are three different styles in our style guide alone for things named after this particular chap. We have St James Park (the home of Exeter City football club) and St James’ Park (the home of Newcastle United); St James’s Palace, London, and St James’s Park, the royal park, both have an S after the apostrophe. On this occasion it seems to have been mislaid. (Well, what can anyone do?)

Squaring up: In an item in Home news in brief, we asserted that Patagotitan mayorum, one of the largest dinosaurs, is thought to have been “as long as three London buses and half the width of a football pitch”. As reader John Harrison wrote to point out, that would make it about as wide as it was long, which would be an odd shape for a dinosaur (although, to be fair, none of us has actually seen one, so you never know). Given Mr Harrison’s calculations, which he helpfully provided, I think he was right to propose that both measurements referred to its length. Now we just need to work out how many times the size of Wales it was, and we’ll have the full set.

Bread and honey: Thanks to Roger Thetford for submitting our typo of the week, from another article about Credit Suisse, which said: “Europe’s stock markets, meanwhile, opened to a sea of red in the baking sector.” D’ough.

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