Mea Culpa: Keeping to the strait, narrow and singular path

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

Mark Knopfler, best known as the songster in hip Eighties pop combo Dire Strait (Alamy)

We called it the Straits of Hormuz in a report of the escalating tension between Iran and the west in the Persian Gulf. This plural form is quite common in spoken English, and accounts for a quarter of the uses in print.

There is nothing wrong with “straits”. Strait means narrow, as in the tautologous “strait and narrow”, which is from the Bible (“strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it”), so “the straits” is the same as “the narrows”. Nevertheless, our style is the Strait of Hormuz.

It is the gap between Musandam peninsula, which is an exclave of Oman, and a group of islands off the Iranian city of Bandar Abbas, one of which is called Hormuz. It is 24 miles wide, compared with the Strait – or Straits – of Dover, which is 21 miles, and about one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through it.

Incomparable: Thanks to Gavin Turner for drawing my attention to an unconventional spelling. In a comment article about a rally for a Final Say referendum in Sunderland, we described Mitch Benn as the “compare”. This is the usual spelling of the more common of two words that sound the same.

We meant compere, another word for master of ceremonies (MC), the person who introduces other performers in a show. The word is French, compère, although our style is to drop all accents. Its original meaning is godfather, from medieval Latin compater, com–, together, and pater, father. I didn’t know that.

Has been: We called John Major a “former Tory prime minister” a couple of times this week, after he said he would launch a legal challenge to any attempt by Boris Johnson to suspend parliament.

I think most of our readers know enough about him to know what we mean. He is a “Tory former prime minister”, in that he is still a Conservative. Although the way things are going, that could change, in which case it is more important to get the word order right.

Songbird: The Court of Proscription has received a request for “songstress” to be added to the Banned List. I was able to reassure the plaintiff – all right, we are supposed to call them claimants these days – that the last time The Independent used the word was in 2017. Congratulations all round.

However, I did discover that we have used “songster” more recently, although the court has ruled that this ironic use was acceptable, in an article about the horror of dating apps that end with a “pretentiously lefty charity worker ... telling me all about his love of some bearded songster I’d never heard of”.

And the time before that was in a travel feature about Africa, in which the writer delighted in the sounds of “songsters like the nightjar, rufous-naped lark, ring-necked dove, striped kingfisher, guinea fowl and African cuckoo”.

Even so, as Mad-Eye Moody says in The Goblet of Fire, what we need is “constant vigilance”.