Mea Culpa: signs of an evolving language

John Rentoul on questions of style and grammar in last week’s Independent

All the signs point to bureaucratic jargon in our dolphin story (Sarasota Dolphin Research Program via AP)

In an article about changing viewing habits with the advent of internet video streaming, one of our writers said: “My wife and I spend our evenings binging television on various platforms.” This puzzled John Harrison, a reader, who assumed that binging rhymed with singing and ringing and thought that it might refer to a text alert on a phone. I suppose it could also have been a verb from Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, on the model of googling.

In fact, we should have spelt it “bingeing”, with an “e” to turn the “g” into a “j” sound, as in “singeing”. Binge, a Leicestershire dialect word meaning “to soak a wooden vessel to make the wood swell to seal leaks”, was first recorded in 1854 as a metaphor for drinking heavily, soaking up alcohol. The meaning was extended around the time of the First World War to include eating as well as drinking, and the term binge-watching was first recorded in 1996.

Before and after: Several readers, including Teri Walsh who got an email in first, spotted this example of a common confusion in a report of the doings of Donald Trump: “The one-term president told the Turning Point Action Conference on Saturday that the American dream was ‘dead’ under Joe Biden as he relentlessly mocked his predecessor and painted a bleak picture of a nation in decline.”