Mea Culpa: when shouty capital letters might be permissible

Over-emphasis, value-laden language and principal spelling confusions in this week’s Independent

‘Moonlight’ NEEDS to win Best Picture, according to an article on our website – and for once we NEED to keep the capital letters

Sometimes rules are there to be broken. We had an interesting article this week by an actor of Arab heritage about how he is usually offered roles as a terrorist. He didn’t want La La Land to “clean up” at the Oscars, and wrote: “Moonlight NEEDS to win Best Picture.” Our style is not to use capitals for emphasis – too shouty – and to use italics instead. But with Moonlight already italicised as the title of a film that would have looked odd: “Moonlight needs to win Best Picture” looks as if the film is called Moonlight Needs. A little bit of shouty was the right way to do it.

Tallow, goodbye: We commented this week on the Bank of England’s refusal to recall and reissue the new £5 notes, which contain small amounts of animal fat. The Bank argues that it would cost £70m to reprint the notes. “That’s on top of the £50,000 cost of destroying the tallow-contaminated ones,” we wrote.

As Paul T Horgan wrote, “contaminated” was an odd word to use. It means “made impure”. If that had been the writer’s opinion, it would have been fine. It was an opinion article, after all. But in the rest of the article the author carefully avoided expressing a view about the use of animal products, focusing entirely on the balance of cost against “certain objectives that are dear to the heart of some groups”, who were listed as if at arm’s length as “vegans, vegetarians, Hindus and Sikhs”.

It is a good example of how value judgements creep in unintended by the choice of words.

If it’s a value judgement you want, I like the new £5 notes.

Prince among spellings: This week we reported the doings of the joint heads of a school in Australia and called them “principles” when we meant “principals”. The words come from the same source, the Latin for first, princeps. When it means chief in English the convention is to spell it principal, whether it is a noun, the head of a college, or the adjective, referring to the main thing. When it means a fundamental (first) truth or proposition it is spelt principle.

It shouldn’t matter, but in the eyes of many readers it undermines our credibility if we appear not to know the convention.

Deadlocked: In the news in brief in the Daily Edition on Tuesday, we reported that “the UK was the second most congested country in the world, behind China, with 11 of the 100 most gridlocked cities”, according to a survey. Thanks to John Harrison for pointing out that British cities do not have grid layout streets. Gridlock has a specific meaning arising from the regular layout typical of American cities: if all four junctions at the corners of a block are jammed with traffic, nothing can move. The same kind of interlocking jam can happen in any dense street pattern, but ours aren’t grids.

We were presumably trying to avoid repeating the word “congested”, but it feels wrong when there are other ways round the duplication, such as “cities with the worst traffic jams”.