Mea Culpa: the grammatical implications of rewriting the constitution

An ocean-going pedalo and other questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

What should we infer from Putin’s actions? (AFP/Getty)

Do we really need separate words for implying and inferring? I was taught that to imply something is to suggest it indirectly, whereas to infer something was to deduce it from indirect statements. The Oxford dictionary is stern about this, and says: “Imply and infer do not mean the same thing and should not be used interchangeably.”

This seems to be a losing battle against a natural change as language evolves. Increasingly “infer” is used to mean “imply”, and I suspect this is another of those cases where there is a long history of it being used thus. As ever, it shouldn’t matter, but as long as a significant number of our readers are sensitive to the difference, it helps to know it, and makes us sound cleverer if we observe the Oxford’s strictures.

This becomes trickier when we turn verbs into nouns and talk about implications and inferences. In a fascinating article last week about what Vladimir Putin is up to in rewriting the Russian constitution, we wrote: “Nobody knows what the president’s real intentions are but one logical inference of the detail of his constitutional reform is that he wants out.”

This may seem a small thing, but the convention requires this to be an “inference from” or an “implication of”.

All at sea: Here is a mistake that we usually make the other way round. “Pedal” and “peddle” sound the same, but, because “peddle” is a rather antique word for “sell” and is used less often than the word for making a pedal-powered vehicle go, it is sometimes misspelt. Thus we have been known to accuse politicians of “pedalling propaganda” and other unlikely exercises.

Last week, however, a wonderful article about the clash between Ivanka Trump and Greta Thunberg concluded with this message for the US president’s daughter: “And then you, Greta, Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore will get onto a small boat and peddle across the Atlantic to get the message out to the US too.”

That is a lovely image, but they would “pedal” their pedalo across the ocean.

Undermore and any go: In last week’s column I grumbled about the tendency to write “any more” as one word. This week I have the opposite complaint. In a report explaining the procedure for deselecting Labour MPs, we said: “MPs under go a ‘trigger ballot’ process and a selection process can only begin if a third of local Labour branches vote in favour.” As Philip Nalpanis pointed out, “undergo” is usually a single word.

Who governs? In an article about Harry and Meghan in Canada, headlined “How a small community is rallying round the royals”, we described John Horgan as “governor of British Columbia”. Thanks to Philip Nalpanis (again) for pointing out that he is actually the premier of the province. Canadian provinces have a lieutenant governor – a ceremonial post representing the Queen – who in British Columbia is Janet Austin. The governor general, who does the same thing for the whole of Canada, is Julie Payette.