Mea Culpa: The whiching hour

Susanna Richards decides it’s all relative in last week’s Independent

Witchcraft is not recommended as a method to determine the right word to use in copy. That is what the style guide is for (Getty)

Using the wrong relative pronoun is perhaps one of the most frequent errors to be found in our writing, and perhaps it is time we sorted it out. In a comment piece about the terrorist attack in Moscow last week, we used the word “which” seven times, but four or five of those whiches were misplaced.

In general, “which” is used to denote additional or subsidiary information, while “that” is a marker of direct relevance – indicating something that we cannot leave out because it is central to what we are saying. So, for instance, when we wrote about the tense atmosphere brought about by current conflicts, we should have described it as “the mistrust and recriminations in international relations that [not which] two major wars, in Ukraine and Gaza, have engendered”. You can tell that this is not subsidiary information, because without the reference to the wars, the reader would be left wondering what mistrust and recriminations we meant.

Conversely, in an item in “World news in brief”, we said that the Slovakian presidential candidate Peter Pellegrini “heads the left-wing Hlas (Voice) party that finished third in the 30 September parliamentary election”. This misuse of the word “that” affords too much relevance to the information about the election result, thereby implying the existence of another Hlas party – one that did not finish third in the election. It was replaced with a comma after “party” and a “which” – goodness knows we had enough of them lying around after extricating them from the article about Moscow.