Mea Culpa: Future proofing

We made an interesting error last week while writing about the Conservative Party’s struggle with its conscience over the climate crisis. Foreign Office minister Andrew Mitchell, we reported, had told a radio programme that he could not be certain that the proposal to stop the sale of new diesel and petrol cars after 2030 would come to fruition, saying: “Well, I’m afraid I can’t prophesise for the future.”

Of course, it was at this point incumbent on an unnamed minion of the editorial department (well, if you want something done properly...) to go and find out if he had really said that or not, and it turned out he hadn’t. “Prophesy” is the correct form, and the minister in question was not going to be caught short on that.

It’s not an uncommon confusion. In fact, so common is it that some online dictionaries offer “prophesise” as an alternative, but generally speaking we try to stick to the uncontroversial form in these instances, and so it was corrected. The interesting part is the reason it’s common, and that comes down to the four main suffixes in English that, when added to a word, denote the action of modifying (or becoming) something. These are “ate”, “(i)fy”, “en” and “ise”, and you will struggle to find such a word that doesn’t end with one of them.

“Prophesy” is an outlier. Apart from “curtsy”, I can’t immediately think of another verb that ends in “sy”. There is “busy”, I suppose, as in to busy oneself, but that’s not quite the same. “Prophesy” and “curtsy” are both essentially nouns that have been turned into verbs, but we only alter the sound for the former, so that its final syllable rhymes with “sigh” (and the spelling, of course – the noun being “prophecy”, whose ending rhymes with “sea”). It really is a bit of an anomaly, if a pleasant one. So it’s entirely understandable that we adjusted it to fit the pattern; lots of people do.

Municipal participle: From what might happen to what already has, we quoted the CEO of a homelessness charity as saying: “The time for empty words on building social homes, and overdue promises on ending no-fault evictions, has long past.” It sounds right, but we’d got the wrong word: “past” is the past participle of pass, while what we actually wanted was the past tense form, which is “passed”.

Deciding when to use these forms is not that hard: you use the participle as a sort of adjective, to describe the condition of something, so it normally comes after “is” (“The time is past”), and the past tense is simply a verb, to indicate something was done, so it comes after “has” (“The time has passed”).

For the many: A headline on a fascinating article about the need to democratise space travel read: “The space race needs more philosophers and artists and less tech-bro billionaires”. It’s not fashionable to make a fuss about “less” and “fewer” these days, but there was enough room to write “fewer”, and in this case I think it would have been worth it just for the purpose of establishing that we didn’t mean Elon should be “less tech-bro” in his efforts to Muskify, well, most things actually.

Common cause: Paul Edwards wrote to query a word in an opinion piece by an American writer about a serial killer in the US. The revelation that “a ‘normal’ man was capable of such heinous acts of violence was hardly surprising for sex workers and advocates”, it read. Mr Edwards was correct to point out that this could have been clearer: as his letter went on to say, British English holds that to advocate something means to espouse a specific idea or course of action. But language is a mutable thing, and the Oxford Dictionary provides for the use of “advocate” in the sense of a supporter of a group of people.

As an aside, I was glad that he mentioned “precarity”, too, which occurred in the same article. It turns out that that is also on the approved list, so we were actually on solid ground there – though I agree with him that “precariousness” is better.

Naked truths: A letter we published last week said that the climate crisis is “erecting nefarious and insuperable obstacles around people who bare the least responsibility for it”. It’s a shame that such an articulate submission should have fallen victim to what I imagine was an overzealous bit of AI, otherwise known as autocorrect, and that it wasn’t caught by our editors. We’ve put it right now.

Slippery customer: A report about a corn snake found on a train in Yorkshire last week referred to the creature as a “runaway reptile”. Philip Nalpanis wrote to suggest that this might be an inappropriate phrase to use about an animal that doesn’t have legs, and I can’t argue with that.

Without a paddle: Lastly, we got a bit carried away in our further coverage of the aforementioned government infighting, reporting that one senior Tory had “told The Independent he feared a raft of ‘dog whistling’ on culture war issues from his own party in the run-up to the election”. “Raft” has been on the Banned List for a very long time, though I’m fond of the mental image it produces, in this case, of a gaggle of well-dressed MPs trying not to get wet as they float around blowing whistles. A bit like Titanic, really, but slightly more depressing.

On that note, back to the future, whatever it might hold. Until next time.