Mea Culpa: Boris Johnson’s new green hyphenated outfit

In an editorial on the government’s new climate target, we wrote of “Mr Johnson’s newly-donned green clothes”, and of the UK’s “existing, legally-binding, target to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050”. It has never been our style to use a hyphen after words ending in “-ly”.  

I don’t know if there is some reason in formal grammar for this, but I have always told myself that the “-ly” acts as a hyphen, because the point of it is to connect with the word that follows it.  

In any case, our policy in recent years has been to eschew hyphens altogether, unless they are needed to avoid ambiguity. Old habits persist, however, and it is quite hard to train journalists out of referring to people by their age, so we often write things like “the 58-year-old said”, when “the 58 year old said” is just as good and less hypheny.  

EU sticking points: A bit of to and fro with some readers this week about Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president. Our style is to refer to her the second time she is mentioned as Ms Von der Leyen in news stories or editorials, and just Von der Leyen in comment articles. I have no idea why the style for comment articles is different; it always has been in my time at The Independent. 

However, the issue in recent weeks is that many of you think she should be Ms von der Leyen or plain von der Leyen. I am afraid that the style guardians have spoken, and the important thing is that we should try to be consistent.  

All-seeing: A headline last week read: “Mystery illness in southern India sees 315 people fall sick and one dead.” It is a common journalistic device to attribute the power of sight to things that don’t have eyes, but sometimes the effect is faintly ridiculous, as Paul Edwards pointed out. “Mystery illness kills one and leaves 315 sick in southern India” seems more precise, and shorter.  

Going, going… : Forgo, meaning to go without, is increasingly spelt forego these days, as Richard Hanson-James noted. We said last week that “QPR and Millwall players would forego the knee ahead of their match on Tuesday”; but we also said that descendants of General Franco, the Spanish dictator, “will have to forgo all this from today”, when a judge ruled they must vacate his former palace.  

In one report about emergency help from the Treasury we said that several companies had “pledged to forego a tax break announced by Rishi Sunak in March”; in another, we quoted Simon Roberts, boss of Sainsbury’s, as saying it was “right to forgo the business rates relief that we have been given”.

I think I have said before that this is probably an irresistible change. The trouble is that forgo looks odd. Forego, which ought to mean to go before, as in foregoing, is never used to mean that, so the chances of confusion are small.  

Some of us will continue to forgo the “e”, but eventually the waters of language change will close over us.