Mea Culpa: on the naming of knights and dames

A bit of a slip-up on the knighthood front the other day, as we referred to Sir Robbie Gibb, a director of the BBC, and then called him Sir Gibb for the rest of the report. Thanks to the readers who pointed this one out.

It can feel a bit odd to put “Sir” in front of a diminutive such as Robbie – as when we call the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey – so the rule that, after the first mention, knights and dames are referred to as Sir or Dame [first name] may have become scrambled.

Airborne castle: In a report of tourists killed by a lightning strike on Amer Fort in Jaipur, India, we said: “Some are suspected to have fallen into the ravine from the watchtower, which is at least 500m from the ground.” Roger Thetford pointed out that not only does this make it sound as if the fort was floating in mid-air, but half a kilometre would be a spectacular drop.

Having had a quick look at a map, I think we may have confused the fort’s height above sea level (about 520m) with the distance to the bottom of the valleys around it (about 100m).

Don’t mention the cup: We mentioned the 1966 World Cup in an editorial last week, commenting on the passage of time since Bobby Moore held up what we briefly called the Jules Remy trophy. It was corrected – too late for most of those receiving the subscriber edition – to Jules Rimet.

Given that there is another World Cup competition in the offing, it may be worth reminding all our writers, as Mick O’Hare reminded me, that the Jules Rimet was given to Brazil after they won it three times in 1970. The current incarnation, first presented to West Germany in 1974, is simply called the Fifa World Cup.

Hence the lyric in “Three Lions” – “Jules Rimet still gleaming” (commonly misheard as “jewels remain still gleaming”) – is a reference to a past that is lost.

Still with the football: We reported on Monday that the Metropolitan Police had admitted being caught out by ticketless fans breaching the outer perimeter of Wembley Stadium. We quoted Laurence Taylor, a deputy assistant commissioner, as saying: “I don’t think anybody was expecting large numbers of people to try and incur into the stadium.” A reader wrote to say they had not seen “incur” used in this way before. I assume it is a back-formation from “incursion”, although the Oxford Dictionary says incur and incursion are both from Latin incurrere, run in or towards.

The conventional form would be “try to invade the stadium”, but it is not our place to rewrite people’s words; our place is to watch the language evolve before our eyes and ears, and to marvel.

Finally on the football: We quoted Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, as saying: “The prime minister and the home secretary gave license to the racists who booed the England players.” It is our place to spell what people say according to the admittedly arbitrary conventions of British English. That is “licence”, the noun. The verb is “gave”. If she had said the prime minister and the home secretary had licensed the racists, we would have spelt it with an “s”. End of lecture.

Finally finally: Two short points from Linda Beeley. “However, the idea has been scrapped due to financial reasons” should have been “... for financial reasons”. As she said, “due to” is reader-repellent bureaucrat-speak.

And “Foreign intelligence agencies are not only seeking to spy on the government, but also members of the public,” should have been: “Foreign intelligence agencies are seeking not only to spy on the government, but also on members of the public.”