Mea Culpa: a couple of geographical errors in the Gulf

John Rentoul on questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Princess Latifa: confusion over her whereabouts (Princess Latifa/BBC)

A couple of readers got in touch about a double error in our report of Princess Latifa’s plea for help. We said: “The daughter of the ruler of Dubai says she is being held ‘hostage’ in a villa in the UAE capitol, two years after her attempted escape from the wealthy emirate was foiled by her father.” Someone had probably been writing so much about the storming of the US Capitol that they got their spelling mixed up. We changed it to “capital”, but it was still wrong, because the capital of the United Arab Emirates is Abu Dhabi. Dubai is the capital of Dubai, one of UAE’s seven constituent emirates.

Spanner in the works: The trouble with some metaphors is that the reader cannot tell whether we are writing about the real thing or the figurative. That is why this opening sentence might have been confusing: “A 22-year-old climate campaigner has been arrested after allegedly sharing a toolkit shared by Greta Thunberg in support of Indian farmers.”

Apart from the double use of “sharing”, Steven Fogel wrote to say he might have grasped the point faster if it had said something like: “A 22-year-old climate campaigner has been arrested after allegedly editing and passing on a document supporting protesting farmers which she had picked up from Greta Thunberg on social media.” That is much better, and a good demonstration of why “toolkit”, except when referring to something with spanners in it, is on the Banned List.

Misattribution: I thought I was pretty familiar with most differences in the use of prepositions in US English, but Henry Peacock spotted two last week that I had not noticed before. We reported: “Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas officiated his third wedding.” Like Henry, I expected an “at” after “officiated”.

A quick scoot around the internet confirmed that US usage is more flexible on this point. The US Merriam-Webster dictionary cites an example from this month, of “the first woman chosen to officiate a Super Bowl”, but makes it clear that this is not simply a sports usage, giving “the bishop officiated the memorial mass” as another example.

Then, in an article about the death of Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, we had this: “Yet conservatives attributed him with grooming a generation of Republican politicians.” In British English “attribute” as a verb is always followed by “to”. We would say something like: “Yet conservatives attributed the grooming of a generation of Republican politicians to him.” I couldn’t find any examples of “attribute with” online, so I suspect this may have been a mistake, even in US English.

It is not an elegant sentence in any case, because “attribute” implies there are differing views of Limbaugh’s contribution, while “grooming” is usually active and deliberate, so either he did or he didn’t. I think we meant to say something more like: “Yet conservatives hail him for shaping the views of a generation of Republican politicians.”

Couldn’t organise what? American and Egyptian archaeologists “have unearthed the oldest known beer factory in the world”, we reported last week. “How does that differ from a brewery?” Mick O’Hare wanted to know. A good question.