Mea Culpa: a chess metaphor that ended up in banking

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

The word check comes from the game of chess, which is the same word, derived from ‘shah’ (iStock)

In an article about Donald Trump and his wall, we said it would land “the American people with a $5bn (£3.9bn) check that somebody else was meant to pay”. Thanks to Julian Self for pointing this out. Our style is British English, which is cheque.

For younger readers, this is a piece of paper used make a payment from a bank account before plastic cards and smartphones came along. Apparently they still use them in the US, where they spell it check.

The etymology is rather wonderful. It comes from the verb check, meaning to examine something to determine its quality or accuracy. A check was originally a counterfoil, a way of keeping track of, or checking, amounts of money paid, but came to refer to the main part of the form that you tear off.

And the word check comes from the game of chess, which is the same word, derived from shah, the Persian for king. The exclamation, “check”, as used in chess when a king is under attack, was adopted in Middle English to mean to stop or control, which in turn came to mean to examine something.

One decimal place: The difference between check and cheque is simply a minor detail of spelling. The more serious fault with that sentence, I thought, was the spurious accuracy of the currency conversion. Nobody cares exactly how much President Trump’s wall would cost if it were ever built. The $5bn figure is often bandied about, but it is a rough approximation that gives us some idea of the scale of the plan – that is, pretty trivial by the standards of large building projects in a rich country such as the US.

So there was no need to translate it into pounds to two significant digits. In any case, by the time a small section of wall might be built, for photo-opportunity purposes in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the exchange rate between the dollar and the pound could well have fluctuated. The $5bn is a round number, so all we needed was a similarly round number to convert it to: £4bn would have done fine.

Twin set: In a short news item we said: “A man has been charged with murdering three pensioners in Exeter, including two twins, Devon and Cornwall Police have said.” As Lowri Cook pointed out, this could be confusing, because it might imply two sets of twins.

It would have been clearer to write, “two of whom were twins”, but most of us are allergic to “whom” these days. We shouldn’t be. It’s a perfectly useful word in sentences such as these, when no one would think of writing “who”. If we really can’t bring ourselves to use it, we could have said, “two of them twins”, although in my opinion that is less elegant.

Been there, got the shirt: We usually get this right but we had three “t-shirts” in The Independent this week. They are called T-shirts because they are in the shape of a capital T. At least we didn’t call them tees.