Mea Culpa: a summons for Julian Assange

In our report of Julian Assange being called a “narcissist” by the judge before whom he appeared after his arrest in the Ecuadorian embassy, we said “he had been summoned in 2012 over an alleged rape in Sweden”.

As Philip Nalpanis pointed out, we could have said “summonsed”, which used to be the legal term meaning to be served with a summons to appear in court.

The etymology of summons is charming. The “s” on the end is not a plural but what the Oxford dictionary calls “an alteration” of the Latin ending “–ita”, with summonita, the feminine past participle of summonere, becoming sumunse in Old French.

Meanwhile, the more straightforward “summon” arrived in English by a parallel route through Old French, somondre, also from Latin summonere, which originally meant “give a hint”, from sub-, “secretly”, and monere, “warn”.

Anyway, the writ of summons was one of many terms modernised in English law in 1999, becoming “claim form” when “plaintiff” became “claimant”. All a bit of a shame, really. But perhaps “summoned” was all right, after all, because we simply meant Assange had been ordered to appear in court.

As it comes: Thanks to Zak Thomas, my colleague who wrote this column last week, for inveighing against “it comes as” – a piece of prefabricated journalese used to bolt two parts of a report together. It is like a discursive form of “amid”, and it is one of those weaknesses of style that I was dimly aware of without realising it.

We used it once this week, in a report on the start of the Indian general election, after setting out the timetable for voting, which takes place over six weeks: “It comes as Bollywood stars have taken on an increasingly important and polarised role in the election season.”

As the point of the story was that a Bollywood film of the life of Narendra Modi, the prime minister, has been blocked from cinema release, there was no need for a linking phrase and we could have simply deleted it.

Untogether: In that report we also said “the country’s general election gets underway”. We often write “under way” as one word. We do that to “any more” as well. I know that most people disagree with my campaign for “for ever” as two words, but I do think that under way and any more should be kept apart.

Cosmic prose: As part of my occasional attempts to show that I am not just a fault-finding curmudgeon, let me pause to praise Tom Peck, our sketch writer. This week he managed not only to avoid repeating tedious Brexit analogies based on the first image of a black hole, but he used light years correctly, as a unit of distance rather than time. “If you happen to be struggling to come to terms with just how far away 53 million light years really is, think of that dark nucleus at the centre of the M87 galaxy as the questions Theresa May was asked, and little old us, here on Earth, as her answers.”