Mea Culpa: Let the genie out of the lamp, not the bottle

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Rubbed up the wrong way: when in doubt, defer to ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ (Getty/iStock)

In an editorial last week we said that simply revoking Article 50 would leave unfinished Brexit business and commented: “The genie, so to speak, was let out of the bottle by David Cameron when he agreed to an in-out referendum in January 2013.”

I know there is a learned dispute about whether the oldest version of the story has a genie (or djinn) trapped in a bottle (or a jar), or a lamp. But the best known story in the English language is “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp”, from One Thousand and One Nights, first published in the early 18th century.

And I know that it is too late to fight back against the tide of popular usage, but I like pointless gestures and think it would be good to see “letting the genie out of the lamp” just once in a while.

Get on the buss: In an interview with Mark Strong, the actor, we said that he went to an orphanage – something I didn’t know existed by the 1960s – when he was five. Apparently its residents “were bused out to local primary schools by day and brought back in the evenings”.

Our style is to spell it “bussed”, which I think is easier to read, because otherwise it looks like the past participle of “buse”, which would be a strange word to use here (it’s American or Caribbean dialect for “abuse”).

The rule is that single-syllable words double the last consonant when you add “–ed”, such as fitted and whetted. But longer words don’t, such as biased, benefited, budgeted, combated, fidgeted, focused, targeted and so on.

A round-about way of saying: We reported that Kick It Out, an organisation that opposes racism in football, said it had agreed with Twitter that the company “would help with its campaigning around the issue”. That form of words always suggests to me that people would be campaigning for related causes nearby, but not actually mentioning, for example, the racist abuse of players. A more direct “campaigning against the problem” might be better.

Syllabilisation: My campaign against unnecessary syllables continues. We used “preventative” a couple of times last week, when “preventive” would have been fine. There are times when extra syllables are needed. Commentating, for example, is different from commenting, because it means providing a continuous narrative such as by a broadcast commentator. But when we are talking about “preventive measures”, we don’t need them.

We also used “utilise”, “utilised” and “utilising” last week. I once suggested a line of code in our website software that would automatically remove “tili” from such words, leaving “use”, “used” and “using”. Sadly, the developers have more important things to do, so we need to remove these surplus syllables by hand.