Mea Culpa: the force of unintelligible American English awakens

American cod Latin and other needless confusions in this week's Independent

We started a report on Thursday thus: "Star Wars: The Force Awakens alum. Adam Driver and JJ Abrams have thrown some light on why Kylo Ren turned to the Dark Side..." I guessed that "alum." is an abbreviation of "alumni", but we shouldn't expect the reader to decode first sentences as if they were crossword clues. I doubt that many people in the UK use the cod-Latin alumnus or its abbreviation much in either speech or writing: it is, as the Oxford Dictionary says, "informal, chiefly US".

We were trying for a word that would include Driver, who played the part of Kylo Ren, and Abrams, director, producer and writer of The Force Awakens. Maybe there isn't one that is readily understood and the sentence should have been recast to say something like: "The director and a star of Star Wars: The Force Awakens have thrown some light..."

Sitting still: We commented on Monday on the case of the 21-year-old woman who was given a suspended three-month sentence for having an abortion. “She was convicted under ancient laws which were passed under Queen Victoria and have sat untouched on Northern Ireland’s statute books for over 150 years.” Leave aside the age of the law concerned – in other contexts the antiquity of Magna Carta is cited as if it were a good thing – I stumbled over the words “have sat”.

Under ancient laws of grammar, this would be described as a wrongly formed continuous past tense: the “correct” form would be “have been sitting”. I wouldn’t dream of describing a common modern usage as “incorrect”. You often hear “sat” for the continuous past tense in conversation these days – “we were sat in my parents’ kitchen until 2am”.

But we ought to know that this usage grates with some readers, undermining the authority of what we write, and so should try to avoid it.

Refutation rebutted: On Wednesday we reported Donald Trump's defeat by Ted Cruz in the Wisconsin primary, and listed the incidents that had set his campaign back over the previous week. One was that Corey Lewandowski, his campaign manager, had been charged with assaulting a female reporter. Actually, we said he had been "charged with battery", which is the American terminology, and which had produced an outbreak of silliness online about whether he could have been plugged directly into the mains. Battery is a term in English common law, and it is distinct from assault (advanced legal pedantry: assault means that the victim was fearful of the contact), so I thought it was fine to use the word, especially as it had been used widely at the time.

Where we went off track was in adding: "Mr Trump refuted the woman’s claims regardless of video evidence." The traditional meaning of "refute" – those ancient rules again – is "to prove a statement to be false". Again, there is nothing wrong with the common use of it to mean rebut, deny or reject, and there was no confusion in this case, because we made it clear that the video evidence failed to support Mr Trump.

Even so, it is better to know that for many people "refuted" has the specific meaning of "disproved", and to use "rejected", which has no such ambiguity, instead.