Mea Culpa: Signs and wonders

Susanna Richards is minding our language in last week’s Independent

The Latin word ‘prodigium’ – something extraordinary, once interpreted as a sign from the gods – is the origin of the word ‘prodigy’ (Getty/iStock)

It’s been a good week for errors, if one can say that: I suppose we are bound to make them, and it is much more fun to write about them when they are interesting ones.

Public embarrassment: In an article about a bishop in California, we said: “Bishop Rohrer is the first publically transgender person holding the post in any mainline Christian denomination.”

Publically? Well, quite, was my response when one of our correspondents, Roger Thetford, pointed out: “Is the adverb formed from the non-existent adjective ‘publical’? No.” It’s been fixed.

Special affect: It seems that’s still what some people think about the word “impact” – that it’s a fancy way to talk about a thing that was done to another thing, and that using boring old “affect”, or indeed “effect”, is a bit demode. As regular readers of this column will know, its usual custodian has been running a campaign against the use of “impact” as a verb for some time.

We’ve used it in our copy this week more times than I can count. It’s not as if it’s wrong. Indeed, it does have the advantage, a bit like a clever pathogen, of being able to adapt itself to its host language as both noun and verb – though I wish it didn’t.

In an article about the government’s new policing bill, for instance, we said: “The debate comes after the Home Office published documents on Monday admitting that different groups would be disproportionately impacted by measures in the bill.” It’s understandable that our writers want to convey the seriousness of a decision or event, but I don’t think “affected” would have made our report any less, well, affecting.

Booby prize: Philip Nalpanis kindly wrote to point out a mistake we had made in our comment on the cabinet reshuffle. We said that “somebody has to be prized out of the picture”, when what we meant was “prised”. Indeed, it seems unlikely that, had certain ministers been more prized by the prime minister, he would have felt the need to sack them.

Philip also mentioned the unexpected appearance in the same article of the word “normalcy”, which is American for “normality” (or perhaps “normalness”, though that isn’t really a word). We do correct US English if we notice it, mainly for consistency, but we missed that example.

Significant error: Another of our readers, Richard Thomas, wrote to comment on our use, in an article about Emma Raducanu, of the word “enormity”, saying that to older readers it still implies awfulness. He is quite right to make the point: it has an established meaning that carries negative connotations, and although its use to mean significance, or gravity (of an occasion, usually) has become ubiquitous, I think we are right to be mindful of putting a downcast spin on reports about happy events, so it was duly changed.

Staying on the subject of Raducanu, we made rather a lovely error in another article about her this week. We said: “A couple of months ago, tennis protege Emma Raducanu was sitting her A-levels.”

It seems a fair bet that the writer meant to say “prodigy”. A protege is a person under someone’s protection, or aegis I suppose, from the Latin verb meaning to cover, via (obviously) the French verb proteger. “Prodigy”, on the other hand, refers to a young person who is precociously good at something, and it comes from the Latin word prodigium, meaning portent, in the sense that it is unexpected – in the old days, something like lightning or a falling star.

Prodigal, interestingly, has a different root, coming from prodigalis, meaning lavish or extravagant (as the prodigal son in the story).

I can’t help but think there may after all be a connection between “prodigal” and “prodigy”, given the similarity of their origins, but my Latin dictionary is of little help on this occasion, giving so many different yet similar words, including prodigiosus, which it says means “unnatural, strange, wonderful, marvellous”. A funny combination, but I think we can certainly apply the latter two to our young (and rising, not falling) tennis star.