Mea Culpa: a prudent resistance from the people of Hong Kong

John Rentoul reviews questions of the use of English in last week’s Independent

Alexandra Wong, known as Grandma Wong, is taken away by police at a protest last month to mark the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from Britain (AFP/Getty)

We wrote about the latest crackdown on civil rights in Hong Kong, saying that “observers think Hong Kong’s civil society might try to use more discrete ways to continue its resistance”. Philip Nalpanis wrote to remind us that the word meaning prudent and unobtrusive is by convention spelt “discreet”, whereas “discrete” is used to mean “separate”.

It is in fact the same word, from the Latin discretus, “separate”, in the sense of “able to be told apart”, hence applied to someone who is “discerning”, knowing the difference between behaving well and badly. The spelling rule is arbitrary, but we might as well know it.

I would also question the use of the phrase “civil society”, which is a fashionable way of saying groups that are independent of the authorities. I think, given that we can be confident that the majority in Hong Kong want to defend their civil rights, we could just have said “the people of Hong Kong”.

I fight on to win: Thanks to Linda Beeley for her defeatist commentary, writing to let me know that she thinks I am losing the war on “amid”. It is true that she supplied a particularly grating example: “Joe Biden is facing shaky unknown political consequences after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban quicker than expected amid his plan to withdraw US troops by the end of this month”.

The computer search tells me we used it 51 times last week, although at least one of those was in its literal and justifiable sense: “Rescuers found a blood-stained pillow amid the rubble yesterday,” we reported from the Haiti earthquake.

But I am not losing this war. I will emerge from the jungle of pedantry in a few decades’ time to discover that my foe has been vanquished – possibly because it has been replaced, Delta-variant-like, by an even worse all-purpose joining word.

Child’s play: Roger Thetford enjoyed our report of Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, which includes investing public money in human capital: “In plain English this means universal pre-kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds, cutting taxes for families with children, and investing in public universities.” Kindergarten is plain German, but we know what we meant.

When a fish is not a fish: In a news story about the memory of cuttlefish we made the elementary mistake of referring to them in a subsequent mention as fish. They are of course cephalopods, related to squid and octopuses, as John Armitage pointed out. He also reminded us that the convention is to italicise scientific Latin, and to capitalise the genus but not the species: thus the cuttlefish is Sepia officinalis, not, as we had it, Sepia Officinalis.

No right of way: This was not our mistake, but if I cannot use this column to mock the prime minister, what is the point? He should have paid attention when I put “path” on the Banned List, as in a path, especially a narrow one, to a deal or an election victory. But no, he went ahead and declared, in the House of Commons on 8 July: “There is no military path to victory for the Taliban.” Look what trouble that has got him into since.