Mea Culpa: A singular preposition

Susanna Richards chases the goblins from last week’s Independent

Some phrasal verbs and assorted syntactic nuisances torment a team of sub-editors (Getty)

Mild conflict [What other kind would we entertain? Ed] arose within the editorial department last week over our use of the word “onto”. It has long been contentious as it is so often got wrong: this week alone we have misused it a number of times, as we have probably done with its alter ego, the phrase “on to”.

Some of us believe that the latter is the only correct form in any circumstances, but I disagree. Of course, we should use it where the single-word version would be incorrect. In an article about the Afghan pilot who has just been granted asylum in Britain, for example, we quoted someone as saying: “It’s what he and his family deserve; now onto the rest who served alongside us.” In this case the “on” part implies “onward”, so it shouldn’t have been combined with the “to”.

A similar issue arises in relation to some phrasal verbs, such as “move on”, wherein the verb is combined with a preposition in a way that changes its meaning. These are phrases in their own right, and thus the “on” ought not to be joined to the “to” that follows. The phrasal verb, though, is also the grammatical goblin that puts paid to the idea of using the two-word form in every instance. In certain contexts, to do so can introduce ambiguity.

Take a recent subheadline in our Daily Edition, in which we said: “Just days after migrants moved on to controversial barge, the Bibby Stockholm is evacuated”. Using “on to” here is distracting, because the phrase “moved on” means something different, and by separating the “to” we have inadvertently, by the rule of equal and opposite reactions, raised the irrelevant question of where the migrants were moving, or being moved, on from. So it is in our interest not to rule out one version or the other.

Nither and thither: In an article about the royal family and the Women’s World Cup final, we wrote that the King and Queen would be staying at home rather than travelling to Australia, and added: “Both Prince William and prime minister Rishi Sunak will also not be attending the game.” I sometimes wonder if language has changed so much in the half-century or so since my youth that we have lost the facility to write a decent negative statement. As Richard Parry asked, rhetorically I think, couldn’t we have started the sentence with “Neither…”?

Plain Mr Barclay, F: We briefly forgot our headline format in an item in our Business section last week. Thanks to Mick O’Hare for letting us know. “Judge doesn’t punish Sir Barclay over divorce payment breach”, we wrote, when we should have used the surname alone. We got it right in the rest of it, though, referring to him as Sir Frederick Barclay initially and thereafter simply as Sir Frederick.

Actually, this is another example of a strangely expressed negative. Headlines that state what someone hasn’t done should be avoided: people want to read about what is happening, not what isn’t, or they would go and buy one of those unnewspapers instead. The way to do it is to express it in terms of what someone did – to accentuate the positive, in a nutshell. Our headline on the website was better; it said that the judge had decided not to punish bold Sir F. Deciding is a positive action, and therefore, in the way in which the brain seems to perceive these things, worth writing (or reading) about.

I’m told that Alastair Campbell advocated a stronger position some years ago, declaring to our political editor at the time, Donald Macintyre, that the use of “not” in a headline was forbidden. I don’t think we need to proscribe it entirely, but perhaps he had a point.

Planes ailing: I like to think it was a slip of the hand, but we lost sight of the plural form in an article about the destruction of a nuclear-capable Tupolev bomber, saying: “Western military experts believe Russia has around 60 of the aircrafts.” I don’t know why some nouns are the same whether they describe lots of a thing or only one of it, but “aircraft” is among them, just like “sheep” and “deer”. Which reminds me of possibly the worst picture caption I’ve ever seen – mercifully edited before it was published – which read: “Deers animal will largely constitute as prey base for the cheetahs”. No, me neither.

No quarter: In a report about the damaging effects of leaving the EU on the British music industry, we wrote: “The survey of 400 musicians for the ISM report found that one in four (40 per cent) have had EU work cancelled since Brexit” – which, as any fule kno, is not quite maths. Reader Alan Pack kindly wrote to alert us to the error. The trouble with silly mistakes like this is that they can create the illusion that we don’t know what we’re talking about, when in most instances our reporting is carefully researched and considered. Anyway, it’s been fixed now.

Alarm bells: We managed to get our spelling mixed up in an article about the pressures on hospital staff who had worked alongside the nurse convicted last week of murder, when we wrote that healthcare professionals would have “gone through the ringer over the last five to eight years”. Ring, rang, wrong. We meant “wringer” – an old-fashioned piece of household technology (I almost called it a labour-saving device, but it was more of the labour-adding variety) that used rollers to squeeze the water out of wet clothes.

On that note, I fear I have wrung every bit of culpa-ing out of the week’s aberrations, so let us move on. To what, though – well, what do you prepose?