Mea Culpa: rewilding the English language

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

‘Glass Onion’ is both a film starring Daniel Craig (above) and a Beatles song. Which is handy for this week’s column... (Netflix)

We used the word “gotten” three times last week, and we are not sorry. I like it, a good 17th-century English past participle exported to the New World and now re-imported; part of a deeply conservative trend, a bit like rewilding Scotland with wolves.

In an article about rising sea levels, we said: “Venice’s margins for survival have gotten narrower.” A couple of readers protested, but I am afraid that their fists beat against the juggernaut of linguistic reaction in vain.

We also said, in a “world news in brief” item, that a pop star and his co-accused had “allegedly assaulted two women they had gotten drunk”. In the Venice case, we could have substituted “become”, but in this one “had got drunk” would have been awkward and rewriting would have been worse.

We also used it in last week’s Mea Culpa column, just to emphasise that we indulgent curmudgeons do not regard all Americanisms as bad.

Caution to the winds: In one of many reports of the Conservative civil war over planning permission for wind turbines, we said: “Onshore wind farms are viewed by environmentalists as among the cheapest and least polluting means of generating the electricity needed by the UK, with Friends of the Earth saying that ditching the ban is a ‘no-brainer’.” We cannot do anything about campaigning organisations using cliches such as “no-brainer”, although we could have found something else that they had said that was more interesting. But we should not have said “viewed by environmentalists as”: either electricity from onshore wind is cheap or it isn’t, and currently it is a lot cheaper than supplies from fossil fuels, so we should simply have stated it as a fact. Thanks to Roger Thetford for pointing that out.

Still a Tory: We continue to put our exes in the wrong places. The “ex-” prefix is short and convenient, but when we described Jake Berry as an “ex-Tory party chair” we risked confusing readers because Berry is not an ex-Tory. “Former Tory party chair” could still imply that he is a former Tory, but dispensing with the hyphen makes it more likely that the reader will get it right first time. We did the same with David Miliband, describing him both as “ex-Labour foreign secretary” and “ex-Tony Blair policy chief”. Those I think should have been “Labour foreign secretary”, because we know he is not foreign secretary at the moment, and “former policy chief for Tony Blair”.

Verbing update: In a review of Daniel Craig in Glass Onion, we said that the film does not “explicitise” his possibly gay character. That is an ungainly and unnecessary construction when we could have just said “make explicit”. Thanks to Gavin Turner for spotting that one.

Galaxies apart: We haven’t had one of these for light years: in an article about some band we said: “Lennon wasn’t that keen when he realised Harrison was just coming up 15 while he was nearly 18, which is light years older when you’re a teenager.” Light years are a measure of distance, not time, as John Schluter pointed out.

Pyrrhus on the road to Damascus: This is another favourite of pedants. We wrote about Syria: “Since 2015, Russia has intervened militarily to support the Assad regime, and has forced a kind of pyrrhic victory over the blasted regime-held areas.” A pyrrhic victory is not just an empty victory, but one won at too great a cost. Given that Assad is still there, and that Putin is still backing him, that is evidently not the case.