Mea Culpa: an archaic spelling in St George’s Chapel

John Rentoul on questions of style and the use of language in last week’s Independent

The Land Rover that drove Prince Philip’s coffin to St George’s Chapel (Reuters)

This came up the last time we wrote about the royal family in St George’s Chapel at Windsor: it must have been one of those weddings. A reader has complained that we said the Queen would be sitting in the quire for the funeral of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. Did this mean she would be sitting on a 20th of a ream of paper, we were asked.

As we discovered last time, quire is an archaic spelling of choir, and old churches sometimes use it, including St George’s Chapel. Isn’t it choaint?

Irritating tic: We have had an uptick in the number of uses of “uptick” recently, and Richard Hanson-James is ticked off about it. “Navalny’s poisoning and jailing have certainly provoked the largest uptick in Russian protest sentiment since 2011-12,” we said, while elsewhere reporting on “a dermatologist who has seen an uptick in younger patients requesting Botox in the past few years”. Let us hope we soon see a downtick in this trend.