Mea Culpa: what is your alibi? Language is changing, your honour

Questions of style and changing usage in this week’s Independent

Kingsley Amis thought there was no excuse for using the word outside of court (Rex)

“Has The Independent now accepted that ‘alibi’ can mean ‘excuse’?” The answer to this question, from a reader this week, is yes. The word, which originally meant evidence that someone could not have committed a crime because they were elsewhere (alibi in Latin), was extended to mean “an excuse” in US English in the 20th century.

That is how it is commonly used in British English these days, including in an editorial on Wednesday: “Not every young person who ends up stabbing someone else to death comes from a troubled home, and nor is it any kind of alibi.”

Personally, I think “excuse” would have been a better word there. And in this column I have often said that we should avoid irritating readers who think that a usage is wrong – or, in this case, “a sign of a weak command of the language” – even if they are in a minority. But in this case I think we have to accept that the language has changed, and that nobody was hurt in the process.

Long live the Kingsley: “Alibi”, incidentally, is one of many pedantries mentioned by Kingsley Amis in his The King’s English, an entertaining guide to usage. Another is that the pristine sense of the word “pristine” is “original, primitive” (from Latin pristinus, former) rather than “clean, spotless”, which developed from the sense of “unspoilt”. The way meanings change like this is one of the joys of etymology.

Press gang: The spread of the word “pressurise” is another changing usage that prompted a reader to comment. We said the prime minister was using the prospect of a no-deal Brexit “to pressurise her ministers and the EU to support her blueprint”. The reader said: “‘Press’ would do perfectly well.”

Years ago, I would have agreed. This is an example of pointless syllabilisation, using three where one would do. But the word has become so familiar that I suspect that “to press her ministers” would read oddly and might cause the reader to hesitate.

Deliverology: Still on the subject of changing usage, Mick O’Hare wrote to object to the recent tendency of politicians to add “on” to “deliver”. I quoted Theresa May in my article last weekend saying: “We must ... make sure it delivers on the results we all want to see.” As Mick said: “The sentence would work perfectly well (indeed it would flow much better) without the ‘on’.”

Of course we have to report what politicians say, but this is one usage that should not (yet) be allowed to escape quotation marks.

Dope: We confused our spellings in a headline in the Daily Edition this week: “In the rush to proscribe cannabis, will the campaign for full legalisation burn out?” Thanks to Bernard Theobald for pointing it out. We meant “prescribe”, referring to the writing of prescriptions, as we were talking about the increasing medical use of cannabis. “Proscribe” is a useless word, which means “ban”, that should be proscribed.