Mea Culpa: Joined-up thinking
Susanna Richards is minding our language in last week’s Independent
We made a bit of a rookie error this week in an article about factory workers, when we said someone was a “dye cutter”. It might be an unfamiliar term to some, but the correct spelling is die, which is a machine (or a template) that enables the precise shaping or cutting of a material such as card or metal.
Unlike some homophones – words that sound the same even if they are spelt or used differently – each of these has its own origin as well as a distinct meaning, so we really have no excuse. Precision is important in our copy, too.
Not our shinest hour: We appeared to have forgotten how to form the past tense of a verb in another article, this time about the price of emergency contraception. We said that a journalist had “shined a light” on the situation, when of course it should have been “shone”. The trouble, sometimes, is that a popular cliche becomes so familiar to us that we forget that the words contained in it exist in their own right, and that they can feasibly be adapted for the purposes of grammar. Which is another reason to try to avoid cliches in the first place.
Thus spoke (Zarathustra): In a nod to the concept of eternal recurrence, perhaps, we have persisted in the use of “spokesman” in this week’s copy, in spite of our best intentions (and an edict on the use of gendered job titles having been issued several years ago). The Independent’s style is “spokesperson”. This is not an arbitrary stipulation; it is simply more efficient to use a slightly longer word in every instance than to have to try to find out whether the person in question is male or female, when it really doesn’t matter and we all have better things to do. The only difficulty this engenders (sorry) is in the choosing of an appropriate pronoun, when one is required, but “they” is usually sufficient.
“Chair” is another example of a neutral term that is still struggling to get its feet under the table. We are pretty good about using it, most of the time, as it’s shorter than “chairman”, which obviously makes it feel less awkward to use. Although we haven’t yet come up with a replacement for its derivatives, such as “chairmanship”, which if shortened to “chairship” might sound like it meant something else entirely – perhaps a peculiar form of dirigible.
All we can really do in that situation is write the sentence in a way that means we don’t have to use it at all, so a phrase such as “under his chairmanship”, which appeared this week, could be changed to “while he was chair”.
Hyphen nation: The excessive use of hyphens is another of those things that comes up every day, all the time, and without fail. This week we have managed to hyphenate quite a variety of phrases that don’t require it, examples of which include “four-day-week” (keep the first, not the second) and “father-of-two” (keep neither, if you must say it at all). An especially interesting one, in an article about Chris Cuomo, the brother of Andrew, was this: “Most news organisations have hard-and-fast rules forbidding journalists from becoming part of the story.”
“Hard and fast” is a lovely old idiom, which according to the Free Dictionary “originally described a ship that was out of the water, either because it had run aground or because it was in dry dock, and hence could not move”. The word “fast” comes from the Old English fæst, meaning steadfast or secure, and shares its etymology with its adverbial form – if you think about it, to run fast is also to run hard, or with determination, I suppose. And there is “fast asleep”.
We don’t need to add hyphens: the phrase is adjectival, but each of the adjectives within it is capable of standing alone. The rules of journalism our writer refers to are firm, and unmoveable, and that makes sense just as it is.
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