Mea Culpa: Do we want to town hall that?

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent, presented by John Rentoul

Saturday 23 December 2023 17:48 GMT
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Tribute banned: Spinal Tap say farewell to yet another drummer
Tribute banned: Spinal Tap say farewell to yet another drummer (Getty)

Traditionally, at this time of year, we get our Spotify most-listened-to lists, a lot of quizzes, and an event in Moscow at which Vladimir Putin talks for hours. This last has been in abeyance but this year it was back. We called it Putin’s “annual marathon press conference and town hall”.

Martin Smith wrote to question our use of “town hall” to mean an all-company or similar meeting. I don’t think it was the right phrase even in US English, because it was a meeting supposedly open to everyone in the country, not just the “town”. “Annual marathon press conference” on its own would have been fine.

Presiding over the praesidium: On the subject of Russian presidents, in the “On This Day” feature on Tuesday, we described Leonid Brezhnev, who was born on that day, as “Soviet president”. He was, as Mick O’Hare reminded us, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and chair of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet, but never president.

Toe-tal destruction: I would like to think we did this on purpose, in a silly-season story in “Home news in brief” about a shin-kicking world championship. We said: “Mr Newby hobbled back to his car, with two of his big toes broken ...”. Several of you wrote in to ask: how many big toes does he have? We meant “both of his big toes”. A more important question might be: why on earth?

Coincidence: On Monday, we reported the death of Colin Burgess under this headline: “AC/DC drummer dies as band pays emotional tribute.” As Richard Parry pointed out, this was a thoughtless use of “as” to link two parts of a sentence. The way we had it conjured up a scene that might have featured in Spinal Tap, in which the band started paying an emotional tribute unaware that their comrade was dying. We needed a dash or a colon instead.

But nothing: A front-page introduction to a comment article said: “Apparently, the Princess of Wales is considering a co-ed school for George. Go for it, but be warned: my spouse was thrown in a lake and nearly drowned at his boys’ only school. Why would anyone want that for their son?” Why indeed? But the “but” in the middle suggested that we were about to bring in an opposite argument; instead we continued to make the case for why the P of W should “go for it”. We needed to delete the phrase “but be warned”; the writer’s spouse should have been thrown in the lake immediately after the “go for it” and a colon.

Country style: In an article reviewing leggings for runners, we said that one pair “performed brilliantly while we clambered over styles”. That is how we usually spell style on the fashion pages, but in the countryside they are spelt “stiles”.

The Old English stigel, if you need to know, is from a Germanic root meaning “to climb”. Style, on the other hand, used to be spelt “stile”, but comes from the Latin stilus, later written as stylus (pen), hence “manner of writing” or “mode of expression”. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “the spelling of the English word was modified by influence of Greek stylos, pillar, which probably is not directly related to it etymologically”.

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