Mea Culpa: behold, we have some pairs of old, forgotten words

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

A rough estimate: US troops stationed in Bamber Bridge, Lancashire, in 1943 (The University of Central Lancashire)

In a profile of a motorcycle racer we quoted a teammate of his exclaiming “low and behold”. Thanks to John Schluter for spotting it. The charming error arises because the word “lo” is, as the Oxford Dictionary observes, archaic.

You occasionally see “lo” on its own, sometimes with an exclamation mark, in hymns or in comic writing affecting to sound old-fashioned, but it survives mostly in the phrase “lo and behold”, which dates from at least 1,000 years ago (it appears in Beowulf).

It is what might be called an antique tautological pair, where two words meaning the same thing are used for emphasis, such as null and void.

Another antique tautological pair is “strait and narrow”, which comes from the Bible: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” “Strait” is another archaic word, which means narrow or tight, hence a straitjacket or the noun form, a strait, a narrow sea passage. In this case, the original phrase has more or less given way to the misspelt form, “straight and narrow”, because “straight” is a more familiar word and the phrase still seems to make sense. Which does not have much to do with anything, but I think it is interesting.

Under or over: In an excellent article about the Bamber Bridge mutiny in the Second World War, in which British locals supported segregated black US soldiers in resisting racist military police, we paraphrased a historian as saying: “The importance of the incident cannot be underestimated.” Thanks to Paul Edwards for pointing out the trap of the double negative.

“Cannot be overstated” is one possible alternative, but “should not be underestimated” feels more like what the author was trying to say.

Being and nothingness: “An online ‘pandemic of misinformation’ is posing an existential threat to the UK’s democracy and way of life,” we reported last week. I suppose that if the House of Lords Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee wants to use an overblown analogy to gain attention, upgrading the old cliche by which the spread of anything bad is an epidemic, it is a free country. But I do not think that we should voluntarily use the word “existential” except when quoting someone. The idea that a lot of untrue stories online might pose a threat to the existence of democracy in this country, or of our “way of life”, whatever that is, is a bit of a stretch.

Mixed metaphor of the week: We reported that a long list of countries and organisations have warned that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to annex Palestinian territory on the West Bank “will only spark a tidal wave of violence”. As they say in 1066 and All That: illustrate, with labelled diagram.