Mea Culpa: Grey matter

Human bones found in grizzly discovery near airport” read a headline on our website last week. Reader Paul Edwards kindly wrote to inform us that we had erred; the word we were looking for was “grisly”, meaning gruesome. The two words have different origins and meanings, though they are often confused; “grizzly” is from the Middle English and Old French words for grey, while “grisly” has a Germanic origin meaning “horrible, to be feared”.

Interestingly, the Canadian explorer who first described grizzly bears in the 18th century wrote that “Bears are three kinds: the black, the red, and the grizzle bear”; a few years later they were described by his Scottish and American counterparts as “grisly”, or “grisley”, which might equally have referred to the character of these beasts, which were reported as being “savage and ferocious”. Thereafter, for quite a long time, the three spellings were used interchangeably. Anyway, our concern is only with modern usage, which is more or less settled, and as such the mistake was corrected.

Dressing down: We reported in an article about children abducted from Ukraine that “officials have said they have evidence that some of [them] are taken to ‘re-education’ camps to learn Russian language, couture and history”. That should have said “culture”, I think, though there is a lot to admire in the traditional textiles and costumes of Eurasia, and I wish we had been writing about the rich heritage of the region instead of the cruelties of conflict. Perhaps one day.

Wide of the mark: In an analytical piece about the death of Alexei Navalny, we referred to the perils of the Russian penal system for a person who is already unwell: “That is exactly what happened to Sergei Magnitsky – the accountant for the US-UK businessman, Bill Browder, who died of neglected pancreatitis in a Moscow prison in 2009.” This gave the impression that Browder had died in prison, when as far as I know he is alive; Magnitsky, sadly, is not. All we needed was a dash after Browder’s name, instead of a comma, for the meaning to be clear (and we didn’t need a comma before it, either).

Now is the winter: In a report about last week’s by-elections, we invented what sounded like an archaic transitive present participle (for those who like that sort of thing). We wrote that a chap called Lord Hayward had said: “If you’re discontenting of the Tories and you change your mind about Brexit then you tend to go to Labour.” I think we meant “discontented with”, but I quite like “discontenting of” and may use it henceforth at random to improve the quality of my grumbling.

Saucer confusion: “Why are some of the most educated people in America now believing in UFOs?” read the headline on a fascinating article about interest in extraterrestrial activity. I suppose it depends on your definition of a UFO, but really, it would be foolish not to believe in the existence of unidentified flying objects, which are reported all the time. Indeed, if we managed to identify them all, there would be a lot less excitement about such things. Anyway, I thought it would be a shame to intervene on the basis of a technicality, so it was left well alone.

Some of all fears: We have been getting our somes wrong again, and I think it is time we sorted them out – especially our muddlement over the words “something” and “somewhat”, which I would like to think everyone knows are not interchangeable, but as ever, the world is a big place, and this is but one small corner. In the aforementioned article about unexplained happenings, we described an incident involving a bright ball of light and an unfortunate driver. “In the aftermath,” we wrote, the chap in question “became somewhat of a local celebrity”.

That should have been “something of”, which is the prevailing usage; and to be fair, we have only used “somewhat of” three times in the past week, though to this weary sub-editor it feels like more. Some dictionaries allow either, but to my mind, the word “somewhat” is much more comfortable when it is used to modify an adjective rather than a noun – for instance, “the sheer beauty that can be found across Britain is somewhat surprising” – and it makes for an easier read when the words are happy in themselves.

I was a little alarmed to find, on investigation, that there is a whole menagerie of other ones like it that we could be having to choose from had they not been killed off by our sensible ancestors. According to one etymological dictionary, “Somewhen is rare and since 19c used almost exclusively in combination with the more common compounds; somewho ... is attested from late 14c but did not endure. Somewhy appeared occasionally in 19c.”

At least we didn’t stray as far from familiar usage as a member of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department, whom we quoted as saying of a boating accident in Florida: “We got a report that 20-somewhat patients were affected.” Now that is a close encounter of the word kind.