Mea Culpa: not waiving but waving

Questions of style, usage and spelling in this week’s Independent

We confused John McCain’s burial and his past imprisonment this week (AFP/Getty)

Three spellings where a single letter makes a different word caught us out this week. In an assessment of the government’s plans for a no-deal Brexit we noted that Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, said “the UK would waive approvals on medicine and food imports from the EU”. Two paragraphs later, we said: “Even if the UK government waives drug supplies through they could very easily be delayed.”

Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for pointing this out. “Waive” with an “i” means refrain from enforcing a rule. It was, according to the Oxford dictionary, originally a legal term for removing the protection of the law, from an Anglo-Norman French variant of Old French gaiver, “allow to become a waif; abandon”.

To “wave through” is a similar idea, but that is a wave without an “i”, a hand movement, as of an official at a barrier indicating that vehicles can pass.

Inter-esting: Then in an article about the death of Senator John McCain we referred to his “interment” – his burial, which hasn’t happened yet – when we meant his “internment” – his imprisonment in Hanoi during the Vietnam war. Thanks to Anthony Slack for drawing this to our attention.

“Inter” is from Old French enterrer, based on Latin in- “into” plus terra, “earth”. “Intern”, on the other hand, comes from the same Latin root as “internal”, meaning imprison, and hence the noun meaning a trainee who works “sometimes without pay”, as the dictionary puts it.

Prophetic words: Thirdly, we wrote that Karl Polanyi’s “prophesy was that this upside-down world order – in which monopoly money is real and people are reduced to human chessmen at its will – could not endure”. That should be prophecy. It is a silly and arbitrary distinction, but the convention is that the noun is spelt with a “c” while the verb – to prophesy – is spelt with an “s” and pronounced differently (“eye” rather than “ee” at the end).

The Oxford dictionary is magnificently snooty: “The differentiation between the spellings of the noun and verb was not established until after 1700 and has no etymological basis.” All the same, it is one of those things that, for some readers, marks us out as knowing our stuff.

Business jargon: This isn’t our fault at all. But we reported the statement by James Quincey, chief executive of Coca-Cola, about its purchase of Costa for £3.9bn, which is such gibberish that it is a wonder and a warning to us all: “Hot beverages is one of the few remaining segments of the total beverage landscape where Coca-Cola does not have a global brand.”

Hot beverages plural become a singular part of a rolling landscape made of orange segments. Or something. “Costa gives us access to this market through a strong coffee platform,” Quincey went on, conjuring up a vision of one of those hydraulic platforms (made of coffee?), with a hole in it, through which he and his colleagues have gained “access” to the company.

What he means is that Coca-Cola didn’t own a coffee company before and now it does. And this is not a problem with American English. Quincey is British.