Mea Culpa: How lengthy has this been going on?

Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister (above), would like to extend the ban on Islamic headscarves in French schools to universities, we reported on Wednesday. He made the comment "in a lengthy interview with the centre-left newspaper Libération", we said.

Some pedants hold that "lengthy" means "overlong". I would not dream of being so pernickety. My objection is simpler: that "lengthy" is itself overlong. If the duration of the interview was relevant, we could have just called it "long". As it was, we should have dropped the adjective altogether.

Forgo forego: We misspelt “forgo” twice in our reports of Ted Cruz's epic struggle to deny Donald Trump the Republican nomination on Monday. Some observers thought Cruz might moderate some of the positions he has adopted in order to try to win more support from the party's establishment. We asked: “Is he prepared, for instance, to forego his claim that there is 'zero recorded warming' of the planet?” (It was, incidentally, a question to which the answer was no.)

We also reported on the unusual decision by the Republican Party in Colorado to allow party activists rather than the wider electorate to choose the delegates to the national convention who will in turn choose the party's candidate. With Trump rampaging like a wounded bull ("it's a crooked deal"), we noted mildly that "questions will be raised about the decision of the Colorado Republicans to forego ordinary caucus or primary voting".

For- without an "e" meant without (and similar things) in Old English, so forgo means to go without. Forego, on the other hand, means to go before, and has fallen out of use except in the past tense as "foregone".

It may take forever: My eccentric campaign to have "for ever" as two words is no more successful now than when I launched it a couple of years ago. This week in The Independent, the computer search tells me I lost five-nil.

We could have written: "angry gun-toting Bats can be consigned for ever to that special corner of comic book movie hell"; "Apple's App Store, which changed mobile technology for ever"; "just because you take a photo in the Snapchat app doesn't mean it has to disappear for ever"; "a huge new bot platform that could change the future of the internet for ever"; and "the good times may not last for ever". But in each case we didn't. Only on Sunday, when we quoted Scarlett Johansson saying, “Long, long ago, I had someone in my life who was forever unavailable", when it was an adverb, did it have to be one word.

We are not Germans: why use a compound word when two short ones will do?

All together now: Sometimes, though, a compound word has come to mean something different from the same words used separately. On Wednesday, we reported extracts from a speech on the European Union that Jeremy Corbyn was going to deliver the next day. We said that he was going to argue that "reforming the organisation from within is better than leaving all together".

The word "altogether" is formed from all and together, but it means completely, whereas all together could mean everyone together. We made it look as if the Labour leader were arguing against several countries leaving the EU at the same time.