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.”

We changed it to “successor” – Trump could have attacked Barack Obama as well, but from the rest of the sentence we can deduce that he was referring to President Biden throughout. We quite often confuse “ancestor” and “descendant” too, but a computer search suggests that we avoided that error in the past seven days.

Word tangle: We had what Martin Smith described as “spaghetti syntax” in a weather report on Monday: “The chances of increasing temperatures are increasingly plummeting in the UK.” Oops.

Coinage: A report of dolphins attacking people off Japanese beaches included a development in the evolution of English that I had not seen before: “They have also put up signages near the beach, warning swimmers of the dolphin attacks.” Thanks to David Jacobs for pointing out this unusual way of saying “signs”. I assume that we, or a news agency, regurgitated the bureaucratic language of a Japanese authority, which had possibly been influenced by the word “signage”, a modern mass noun for signs.

Inelegant variation: Henry Peacock spotted this fine example in an article in the magazine section: “Following a spell as a green door (the shade of which was rejected by the planning committee), the entryway was repainted as instructed by Dickson, but Edinburgh council has now received a complaint that the door is back to pink.” Nobody ever calls a door an “entryway”; repeating the word “door” would have been fine, calling it “it” on the third mention: “it is back to pink”.

The in crowd: Finally, thanks to Mick O’Hare for writing in appreciation of some of our writers’ work, which he enjoys “because it introduces me to things that I know absolutely nothing about – and rarely care about, but that makes them no less fascinating”.

But he does raise a question about the way the reader is addressed. One article last weekend began: “By now you’ll be familiar with...” before going on to talk about things that many readers will be unfamiliar with, such as “deep dives”, “Jonah Hill” and “your WhatsApp groups”. All writers make assumptions about what their readers know, and some of the enthusiasm of being “in the know” is lost if you have to stop all the time and explain basic references, but we should be careful about addressing the reader directly and implying that they have been left out by the cool kids.