Mea Culpa: Toil and trouble

The season is upon us, and we rose to the occasion with some jiggery-pokery in an article about “Chreaster eggs” (don’t ask), which included a reference to some festive (perhaps not quite the word) grub. “If the food team at Aldi can come up with Specially Selected Breaded Chicken Doughnuts ... for a new starter this Christmas, could they not think of something novel in the confectionary department,” we wrote, inadvertently conjuring up a new adjective.

I rather like “confectionary” – perhaps we could use it as an alternative word for “sweet” – but that was not what we meant: the noun we were after is spelt with an “e”. In fact, the etymology is rather fitting for Halloween. It comes from the Old French confeccion via the 14th-century English confescioun, which means, according to my go-to book of spells, “anything prepared by mixing ingredients”. Similar then, I guess, to how the resident witches at Aldi came up with the weird chicken doughnuts.

It is interesting that we tend to use one spelling to denote an adjective and another to denote a noun. There are exceptions, of course, but comparatively few. Most adjectives that end in “ery”, such as glittery, or buttery, are formed of a noun ending in “er” and the suffix “y”, which isn’t quite the same. And there is the seasonally appropriate “eery” – the precursor to the now more common “eerie” – but I’m not sure that counts either.

One might ask why it matters how we spell these words, and, given the low potential for ambiguity – even with those that are otherwise identical, such as stationery and stationary – the distinction is more or less arbitrary (arbitrery?). But adherence to convention results in a more comfortable read, and that in itself is worth the effort.

Just cause: Language is dynamic, and although it is uncommon for nouns to become adjectives, they can readily evolve into verbs. We invented a new one in an editorial about US politics last week. “It would equally be a surprise if Mr Musk didn’t find a way to advantage his own commercial interests,” we said – the usual word is “advance”, and I think it was probably an autocorrection, but the fact that it went unnoticed illustrates the ease with which this process can occur.

We also caused disquiet with our use of an established example, in an article that sought to explain an intervention by the lady chief justice on the subject of constitutional boundaries. “The Magna Carta clause referenced by Baroness Carr ...” we said, causing hackles to rise across the realm. I agree that “referred to” would have been better – not because there is anything wrong with words changing, but because “reference” has an important role as a noun, and diversifying its application brings a higher risk of both confusion and overuse.

Riddles and affairs: There was muddlement of a different kind in an article about the death of a Palestinian militant, in which we wrote: “After more than a year hunting Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the 7 October attacks that sparked Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, it was to be in a chance encounter during which the leader of Hamas was killed by Israeli troops.”

I’m not quite sure what happened here: the participle at the start seems to have been left dangling, while the bit about the chance encounter reads as though an attempt at grammatical sorcery went a bit wrong. What we should have written was something like this: “After more than a year being pursued by his enemies, Yahya Sinwar ... was finally killed following a chance encounter with Israeli troops.”

Feasibility study: Not to be outdone by the mistakes of the week before last, we again tried to assign degrees of intensity to a condition that is absolute. “There are 2.8 million people with suspected ADHD in the UK – yet adults across the country are finding it increasingly impossible to get a diagnosis,” we wrote. If something is impossible, it cannot be done; thus, the level of impossibility cannot increase. I wonder, though, if we meant that it is increasingly the case that obtaining a (timely) diagnosis is not possible, in which case we could have said: “yet more and more adults across the country are finding it impossible to get a diagnosis”.

Event horizon: Thanks to reader Ian Crook for drawing our attention to a rich seam of metaphorical chaos in a comment piece about the forthcoming festival of economic misery known as the Budget. Rumour suggests that “inheritance tax is in Rachel Reeves’s sights as she battles to plug a fiscal black hole that could be as high as £40bn”, it read. As Mr Crook pointed out, figurative cosmic entities “aren’t high or low, they’re large or small”.

I’m not sure if our correspondent made it to the end of the article, but at that point we further expanded on our theme of scientific implausibility, declaring: “We’re talking drop in the ocean territory here when it comes to plugging the vast black hole.” The author also noted that Reeves was “playing with fire”, which added to the picture of elemental mayhem.

I would be reluctant to proscribe the use of mixed metaphors; in this case, the meaning was perfectly clear, and although it was a serious analysis of the options facing the new chancellor, the tone of the piece was lighthearted. In fact, I like the sort of writing that combines informative content with joyful expression. It’s this juxtaposition of ingredients that makes it fun, as long as it is carefully written and edited.

On that note, I shall depart – not to the confectionary hereafter, but to attempt to fashion a ghost costume from a fitted sheet. Try doing that without cutting corners.