Mea Culpa: One bad metaphor can spoil the whole barrel

A rotten analogy and arbitrary differences between similar words in this week’s Independent

Apples, seemingly uncontaminated

A comment article this week took issue with the view that Carillion, the company that went bust last month, was a one-off failure, rather than evidence of a widespread problem among public contractors. “Many will say the firm was just one rotten apple,” the article said.

This is not what the rotten apple metaphor means. It refers to the way a single rotten apple can contaminate a whole barrel. The question is whether Carillion is a single, self-contained and non-contaminating instance of rottenness, or whether private contractors for public services are all a bit rotten to start with.

Make history: Saturday’s Daily Edition carried an article with the headline “Gavin Williamson confesses to historic office romance”. As Philip Nalpanis pointed out, the Defence Secretary’s affair is unlikely to be historic. It might have made history in the two families affected, but what we meant was “historical” – that is, something that happened a while ago.

The distinction between historic and historical is arbitrary, and there was no ambiguity here, but it is worth knowing the convention and observing it because it inspires confidence, among those readers who know the convention, that we care about language.

Battle forgone: The struggle to maintain the difference between two other similar words has probably been lost, if indeed it was ever won. We referred in News in Brief in the Daily Edition this week to Casey Affleck’s “decision to forego giving away” the Best Actress Award at the 2018 Oscars. Forgo means “go without”, but is usually spelt forego, which can also mean “go before”. Hence “forgoing” pleasures means doing without them, while “the foregoing” means the stuff we have just been writing about.

The Oxford Dictionary tries to preserve the version without the “e”, citing the difference between the Old English prefixes for- (against or without, as in forbid and forget) and fore- (before or in front). But I am not sure forgo was ever widely used. A search of Google Books (using Ngram Viewer) suggests the “e” form was always more common, and that forgo was rarer in the 19th and early 20th centuries than it is now.

Sometimes we pedants need to know when we are beaten, and this is one of those times. “Forgo” just looks odd to most people. My advice is to rephrase. On this occasion we used the word only because we had already referred to “the actor’s decision to withdraw from presenting”. At the second mention, we could have talked about his pulling out of the ceremony instead.