Mea Culpa: A nation left dangling by a rogue participle

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Fame game: you either know Joanna Newsom or you don’t (PA)

We had a dangling participle in the first sentence of an editorial last week: “Emerging, submarine-like, for a photo op at a Covid-secure cabinet meeting, the nation is reminded of the existence of its prime minister.” Thanks to Richard Thomas for pointing it out. The meaning is clear enough, but the reader might have to scan the sentence twice just to be sure.

“Emerging, submarine-like” is a participial phrase looking for a noun to attach itself to, and the first noun we come across is “the nation”; but it was not the nation that was surfacing to have its photo taken, it was the prime minister.

If the sentence had started, “As he emerges, submarine-like”, the reader would have been pulled forward in a similar way, looking for a “he” to make sense of it, and landing with satisfying certainty on the “prime minister”.

Crowds of treasure: We referred to “weary hoards” of protesters at one point. We meant “hordes”, a word meaning tribes or troops of Tartar or other nomads, which came via Polish horda from the Turkish ordu, meaning a (royal) camp. Hoard is a secret stock or store, and is of Germanic origin (the German is Hort).

Never heard of them: We said that Margaret Thatcher “famously asked about anyone put forward for a senior job: ‘Is he one of us?’” I have famously said that using the word “famously” is a double insult to the reader: either we know Thatcher’s catchphrase, in which case the word is unnecessary, or we don’t and we are being told we are ignorant because we don’t know this “famous” thing.

The word can always and everywhere be deleted with advantage. For example, last week we also said: “Boris Johnson was famously a member of the riotously destructive Bullingdon Club” – delete. In an opinion article about the death of Chadwick Boseman, we said he “famously played the first black superhero to get his own standalone film” – delete. And in an interview with Bill Callahan, the singer-songwriter, we referred to his previous relationships, including with Joanna Newsom, “whose Have One on Me is famously a break-up album”. It is not so famous that news has reached me, I’m afraid, so I gain nothing – indeed I lose a little – by being told that everybody else knows.

Iconography: Mind you, if there is a word worse than “famously” it is “iconic”, which is often used just to mean “famous” and is just as unnecessary. We described Newton and Darwin as “the most iconic figures in this nation’s scientific history” the other day, and we really shouldn’t have. “Important” may seem a dull word but it does the work without trying too hard.