Mea Culpa: a future coup against Ivanka Trump’s presidency

When we said that “Ivanka Trump has been deposed” last week my first thought was that we were describing a nightmare future in which she had become US president but had then been removed from office suddenly and forcefully. In fact, the report said: “Ivanka Trump has been deposed by attorneys alleging that President Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration committee misused donor funds.” It was drawn to my attention by Henry Peacock, for whom this use of the word “depose” was also unfamiliar.  

In US legal language, it means to require someone to give a deposition, or a formal statement, to prepare for a trial. Someone who is deposed is known as a deponent. Sometimes we have to use Americanisms if they are the correct legal terms, but in this case the ambiguity should prompt us to rephrase. The headline and first paragraph at least could have said, for example, that Trump had been subpoenaed, which she was as well – it is a similar and better-known term referring to a court instruction to provide documents.  

Hanging in shame: In a fascinating article about the history of Robin Hood, we said that the corpse of Robert of Wetherby, who may have been the same person, was “hung in chains”. For pedants who insist that people are “hanged” as a form of execution, this was fine, because Robert’s death was not by hanging: he was beheaded and his body was displayed as a warning.  

Unfortunately, though, Roger Thetford noticed that we slipped up in a caption on a picture that included several bodies hanging by the neck, which said: “Shortly before Robert of Wetherby was hunted down and beheaded, the Crown had hung virtually the entire rebel garrison of Bedford Castle”. That should have been “hanged”.  

Now you see it: One of our correspondents has spotted a problem with our recent policy of abandoning all accents. He thought “The curious case of Schrodinger’s scotch egg” was a clever headline, but that it is wrong simply to drop the umlaut. The convention used to be that it should be either Schrödinger or Schroedinger, with “oe” being an alternative to an umlauted “o”. Personally, I think the “oe” version would look as if we were talking about someone else who spells their name that way, whereas the umlautless Schrodinger looks like the Austrian-Irish physicist, on a media website that has gone for a clean, accent-free look. 

Tied up in knots: We also received a complaint about the use of “detangling” from a reader who thought it should be “untangling” unless we were talking about literal hair. I don’t agree, although I think we mixed the metaphor in the final sentence of this article about the “ethical, social, economic and political complications” of coronavirus immunity passports: “Detangling these various threads of concern will pose quite the challenge. If Downing Street is truly serious about implementing this system, it must tread carefully.”

Black humour: What headline to put on an article about the revival in demand for black pudding? “The proof is in the pudding.” The first phrase that comes to mind, even if it’s nonsense, a corruption of the longer saying, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”? Job done.