Mea Culpa: Grapes of wrath

Susanna Richards discovers a strange brew in last week’s Independent

Fomentation process: some excitable young fruit throw themselves into the melee (Getty/iStock)

As it all kicked off across the country last week, The Independent, too, was the scene of some aberrant conduct – mostly in the form of syntactic disarray, with a few questionable spellings lobbed in for good measure. While such recklessness might not constitute a criminal offence, it is only right that we fess up to it. Meanwhile, it is pleasing to see that the prime minister has taken a leaf out of our book and decided to make an example of those involved in the real-life rioting (I would say something here about exemplary sentences, but that joke has already been made).

Anyway, as the arguments continued over who was responsible for the recent unrest, we reported that John Swinney, the leader of the SNP, had said that “the social media platform that Elon Musk owns is essentially being used as a platform for the fermenting of hate within our society”. The words “ferment” and “foment” have similar etymologies: ferment derives from the Latin fervere, meaning to boil or seethe, while foment comes from another verb, fovere, meaning to heat – or to cherish, which is interesting. Perhaps it’s possible for nice things to be fomented, though we never seem to use it in that sense.

In any case, although there is some overlap in the meaning of the two words, we generally use “ferment” in relation to the chemical process of creating heat – for instance in winemaking – while “foment” is only ever used to describe cooking up trouble in a human context. So it is probably better to allocate each of them a distinct usage, to avoid any squabbling (or worse).

Off location: Turning to another hot topic, we were alerted by John Harrison to an anomalous image in an article about the weather. “South to bake in 34C heat,” we warned above a lovely photo of a beach in Northumberland. Having consulted the usual sources I can confirm that this is very much not in the South. Apologies to readers from Bamburgh for any confusion that ensued as to whereabouts they were.

Onto, on to, and through and through: The argument about “onto” versus “on to” has been going on for as long as I can remember, and perhaps it’s time that we slay this manxome foe. Helpfully, we published a couple of articles last week about the actions of Ukraine in Russian territory, and managed to use the two styles in parallel in a more or less identical context. “Ukraine has not only held onto gains made in recent days, but systematically advanced through villages and towns in the Kursk region in the west of Russia,” we said in one, while noting in the other that “If the Ukrainians manage to dig in and hang on to at least some of these gains, then Mr Zelensky will have in his pocket a highly valuable territorial bargaining chip.”

The second example is how it ought to be done. The reason for this is that “onto” (one word) is a preposition. This means that it describes a location relative to an object (physical or otherwise), which in the case of “onto” is almost invariably a surface. For instance, to draw inspiration from one of my recent days off, “She leapt from a moving train onto a horse” – the surface in that instance being the horse. So that is where you should use “onto”. [You never leave your desk – Ed]

In most other circumstances, it is better to use two words. Sometimes, the “on” forms part of the preceding phrasal verb (hold on, hang on, and so, er, on) and thus should not be poached to form part of a new word – as it was in the first example above. There is also the context in which “on” is essentially an abbreviation of “onward” – for instance, “The girl walked through the forest and on to a town.” To write that she had “walked onto a town” would suggest that she was less a girl than a rather clumsy giant.

Find out what it means (to me): Another thing we still seem to struggle with on occasion is the word “respectively”, seen here being flagrantly misused in one of the articles mentioned above: “This time, the seizure of a surprising amount of Russian territory around Kursk ... is a much more significant move and goes way beyond its undoubted equal and opposite effects on Russian and Ukrainian morale, respectively.”

No, no, no. “Respectively” is used when a) we want to attach or attribute two or more actions, qualities or circumstances to two or more entities, and b) it is not clear which belongs to which. The following is a good example, taken from another report last week: “Austrian Airlines and United have cancelled flights from Vienna and Washington DC respectively.” This makes it clear that the first airline cancelled flights from Vienna, and the second from Washington, rather than both having cancelled flights from both (or some other permutation).

In the article about Ukraine, we were not trying to suggest that the developments in question had had an equal effect on Russian morale and an opposite effect on that of the Ukrainians. That would have made no sense at all.