Mea Culpa: An initiation ceremony for Spider-Man fans

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Web of intrigue: the superhero bones up on the Marvel universe (Rebecca Cabage/Invision/AP)

In a comment article about the dispute between Sony and Disney about the rights to Spider-Man, we used the phrase “for the uninitiated …” Speaking as a semi-initiate, with a rudimentary understanding of the difference between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC one, I thought that this might be a patronising way to introduce a paragraph of explanation.

I can see why the author did it, knowing that most of those who would be interested in the article in the first place would be familiar with the background. But there is never any harm in a short recap of “the story so far”, even for an audience that knows it well.

Much more often, we make the opposite mistake of assuming too much knowledge on the part of the reader. I was struck last week by an account by a fellow journalist of a conversation she overheard on a train: “A neighbouring couple who had heard something about parliament being suspended, gave up three lines into the BBC News story in exasperation and talked about something else.”

I am sure that if they had been reading The Independent, they would have known what was going on.

Flat out: We introduced an exclusive analysis of opinion polls this week thus: “Polling savant John Curtice explains the lay of the land.” Henry Peacock has been in touch to suggest that we should have said “the lie of the land”.

That is indeed the phrase that I would use. If pressed, I would explain it by saying it means “the way the land lies” and that most people would not say “the way the land lays”.

The Oxford dictionary describes “the lay of the land” as North American and “lie” as British. This would explain why the “lay” phrase is used four times as often on the internet, according to Google – even Google Books, which has millions of titles scanned, finds that it occurs three times as often.

In British newspapers, however, “the lie of the land” still has the advantage, used 66 times over the past year, as opposed to 49 instances of “the lay of the land”.

I suspect this is one of those shifts in language that has nearly run its course. We should prefer “the lie of the land” while there are many British readers for whom “the lay of the land” feels wrong, but we should accept that it may start to sound old-fashioned.

For ever more: While on the subject of language change, I am pleased to report that we used “any more” as two words 13 times last week, and as one word only eight times. I know it is only a stylistic preference, but I think “any more” is more elegant than “anymore”, just as I prefer “for ever” to “forever”. So there.