Mea Culpa: Joined-up thinking

Susanna Richards is minding our language in last week’s Independent

High and dry: another phrase that doesn’t require hyphens (Getty/iStock)

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.