Mea Culpa: Put out the flags for a mistake that comes round every other year

There are flags in central London, and police motorbike outriders flashing their blue lights hither and thither. The Commonwealth heads of government are in town. Their meeting is a grand event held every other year, and this year was London’s turn.

We got our words mixed up in one article this week, describing it as the “biannual” Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. That means twice a year. We meant “biennial”, as Richard Hanson-James pointed out, which means once every two years. He reassured us that Nick Robinson made the same mistake on the BBC’s Today programme, and had to correct himself afterwards.

There is no good reason for the difference between the two words. They both come from the Latin bi-, twice or double, and annus, year. One form has come to mean two times in one year; the other once every double year.

Anyway, the next one will be in Rwanda in 2020.

Friendly fire: I wrote about “gun-rights friendly” candidates in US elections last week, and was quickly reminded of the words of Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, about the idea of a Council of Europe in 1948: “When you open that Pandora’s box, you will find it full of Trojan horses.”

My item prompted Don Connigale, our senior sub-editor, to suggest slightly mischievously that, instead of moving the hyphen – we had originally said “gun rights-friendly” – we could have dropped it altogether. So then the sentence would have read: “The Political Victory Fund contributes money to gun rights friendly candidates that the National Rifle Association has endorsed.” Don asked: “Is the meaning not still clear?”

It is, as he acknowledges, a borderline case: it may be slightly easier to understand with a hyphen, because otherwise the “rights” attaches itself to the “friendly” and detaches itself from the “gun”.

On the other hand, Don is right that the hyphen adds to the clutter. Another correspondent wrote with a simpler, more radical idea. Just delete the awkward “something-friendly” phrase altogether, so that the sentence would read: “The Political Victory Fund contributes money to candidates that the National Rifle Association has endorsed.” Solved.

Campaign against clutter: Anyway, Don went on to explain his approach to hyphens, which is to get rid of them whenever possible. “We already remove hyphens from phrases like free trade agreement, civil rights movement, high street bank, either because it is a common phrase, or because it is perfectly clear from context what is meant.”

As he said, there are surprisingly few cases where hyphens are needed to avoid ambiguity, such as: “Police are looking for a black-cab driver following an attack last night.” Without the hyphen it wouldn’t be clear if the vehicle or the driver were black. But it would be fine to say, “The black cab driver John Worboys has been sentenced to a minimum eight years in prison,” because most readers know what John Worboys looks like and what he did for a living.

Don said, and I agree with him, that some writers feel they have to follow “some half-remembered rule about adjectival phrases – but they are misunderstanding the reason for the rule, which is that the hyphen is to help where there is confusion; it should not just be slung in for the sake of it”.

So let’s hear it for first class travel, five star hotels and working class heroes. And if we do have to stick two words together, he thinks a single word is often preferable to a hyphenated one. Which is why our style is cybercrime, soundbite, whistleblower and so on.

Forward with the campaign against unnecessary hyphens!