Mea Culpa: Ripping yarns

Welcome to the festive edition of your favourite head-in-hands gripefest. It may be Christmas, but there’s not been much let-up on the sub-editing desk. “Ministers rip up rules to protect asylum seekers” read the headline on our Daily Edition one morning last week. This is all very well, but as reader Henry Peacock wrote to point out, it wasn’t clear whether the government had done something bad or something good.

I did wonder whether a dramatic change of heart had occurred: could it be that those in charge of our immigration policies had indeed been subject to a visitation, perhaps by some Christmas spirit? Sadly not. My esteemed colleague suggests that we could have put something like “Sunak rips up rules that protect asylum seekers” instead, which would have removed any ambiguity.

Back to scule: I’m sorry to report that we still seem to be writing miniscule instead of minuscule, most recently in an article about business rates. We really ought to know better. Having said that, there has been a marked decline of late in the number of times we’ve misspelt it: from nine instances in August, and five in September, we are now down to about once a month. So perhaps people are paying attention after all. We’ve still not quite got to grips with a different bugbear, though, having written in a report about the sad state of affairs in the NHS that a patient “had suffered mental health illness from a young age”. Enough of this nonsense: “had suffered from mental illness” would have been perfectly acceptable.

A rare bird: We seem to have developed a habit of calling the OBR, the independent watchdog funded by the Treasury to provide economic forecasts to the government, the “Office for Budgetary Responsibility”. This always makes me laugh: it should be “budget”, and “budgetary” sounds to me like a cross between a budgie and a canary, though why we might need a public body to be responsible for such a creature would be anyone’s guess. We’ve also referred to it in the past as the Office of Budget Review, so it’s obviously one of those titles that people find hard to remember. I suppose each of the alternatives affords an approximate idea of what it does, but even so, we should try to get these things right or it looks as if we don’t know what we’re talking about.

No room for descent: In a comment piece that took issue with a certain Christmas pop song, we described it as “a racist and ignorant creation that ended up condescending and patronising an entire group of people”. Oops. A person can condescend to someone, or to do something, or they can be condescending towards another person, but you do need a preposition in all of these contexts. In fact, condescending and patronising mean roughly the same thing, so a better fix might have been to keep “patronising” and simply delete the other.

Order restored: We made what is probably quite a common error in our “Home news in brief” report of the death of a well-known chef, referring to him as a “top Edinburgh restauranteur”. It should have said restaurateur, though the spelling we used has form, having been recorded at least as far back as the 1880s. The OED calls that spelling “erroneous”, and although I have sympathy with those who might suggest there’s not a lot in it, I tend to think we should aspire to consistency – and that we should try not to buck the conventions of formal writing, as to do so can discomfit many of our readers. Thanks to Richard Parry for writing in.

Incidentally, both of the French dictionaries I checked – our modern Collins one and my Cassell’s Compact from 1937, which is in surprisingly good shape – give the first meaning of restaurateur as “restorer”, while Cassell’s gives the second as “eating-house keeper”. For the verb restaurer it offers opposite sides of the coin: to restore, to repair, to revive, to refresh, and also to take refreshment or recover one’s strength.

I hope this Christmas sees our readers doing a lot of those things. Until next time, the best of wishes.