Mea Culpa: how the lonely onlys might get lost

Simon Kelner, the editor of The Independent from 1998 to 2008, was a stickler for the placing of “only”. He and I got on well, and often the only changes he would make to leading articles I drafted for him would be to move an only and delete a comma. (One of his other common complaints was that someone had got out the “comma jar” and sprinkled some over the copy.)

English is such a flexible language that it does not usually matter if an “only” finds itself detached from the word or phrase to which it applies: the meaning remains clear. But John Armitage drew my attention to a case last week where a misplaced “only” created an ambiguity. In an article about sexual harassment in private schools, we said that a debating prize “has been won by a fee-paying school on 41 occasions, 29 of which by schools that only admitted boys at the time of victory”.

I think most readers would have gained the intended meaning without a glitch, because they would be expecting the article to mention boys-only schools, but Simon Kelner, John Armitage and I might hesitate over the implication that the schools didn’t admit boys before their victory. Ideally, it should have been “schools that admitted only boys”.

From the get stop: I am all for slang if it is apt or interesting, but I agree with Richard Lewis, who writes to say that he found the phrase “from the get go” jarring in an article about vaccine wars with the EU. The origin of the phrase is QI (quite interesting), in that it seems to come from 1950s African-American usage, possibly originally “git-go”, although some people assume it is a shortening of “ready, get set, go”. But it is now just a tic of pointless Americanism and we should do without it.

No need to go back back: The Green Homes Grant, a government voucher scheme, had been due to end this year but was then extended. Last week, we reported a business department announcement that the scheme “will now revert back to ending on 31 March this year”. As Roger Thetford pointed out, “back” is not needed because revert means “go back”.

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I missed a trick there, because I should of course have replied to Roger’s email by promising to “revert” to him, or worse still to “circle back”, two usages that seem to have swept through the world of email like viruses.

Gold rush: In our summary of what happened in the second episode of Line of Duty (look away now if you want to avoid spoilers), such articles being a popular new form of journalism, we said that AC-12 (that’s Anti-Corruption Unit 12 to those not versed in LoD lore) “search all the potential suspects’ properties – finding a motherload in the residence of Jatri”. Thanks to Paul Edwards for pointing out that this should be “mother lode”, the main vein of gold or other ores or minerals, hence a rich source of something.