Mea Culpa: The powerful magic of the hyphen and the lower-case ‘e’

Questions of style, language and pedantry in last week’s Independent, policed by John Rentoul

JRR Tolkien, an academic and philologist, called his imagined world Middle-earth (Alamy)

This is one of those bits of pedantry that really shouldn’t matter at all, and yet it does. We got it right everywhere except in a short headline on our front page, which greeted The Rings of Power, the Lord of the Rings prequel, with: “Welcome back to Middle Earth.”

JRR Tolkien called his world “Middle-earth” (hyphen, lower-case “e”), and so we should, too. Many of the enthusiasts for Tolkien’s work (and/or its CGI-enhanced visualisations) care passionately about every detail, and they will mark us down as amateurs if we fail to conform. We have been warned.

Missing the boat: We reported that the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales had “broken down off the south coast shortly after embarking for exercises in the US”. Thanks to Paul Edwards for pointing out that to embark means to get on to a ship – or a plane – or to put someone or something on a ship or plane. It is from the French em-, “in”, and barque, “ship, bark”, and the opposite is “disembark”. We meant to say that the ship was “departing” for exercises in, or more probably off, the US.