Mea Culpa: getting out of the way of the new Bob Dylan box set

More grammar and usage questions in this week’s Independent

Trouble No More: Bob Dylan’s eagerly awaited box set (Getty)

David Lister is one of our most experienced writers – indeed I think he is the only member of The Independent’s staff from the launch in 1986 who is still working here – but even Homer nods. He wrote about Bob Dylan this week and said “the new eight-CD bootleg box set, with 14 previously unreleased tracks, is still keenly anticipated”.

I know that even the Oxford Dictionary now lists the main meaning of anticipate thus: “Regard as probable; expect or predict.” This is indeed probably the commonest meaning now, but for a lot of people it still means “to act in advance”. This is from the Latin anticipat-, from ante- before, and capere, take.

To anticipate a punch means to duck or parry it. And I suppose you could anticipate the release of a CD box set by saving up to buy it, but here we simply meant that it was keenly awaited.

Go whistle: In a comment article about Priti Patel’s attempt to clarify her previous statement about her breach of the rules for ministers, we said: “Convention is there to be flaunted.” Flaunt and flout are similar, and their meaning overlaps, so they can be confused. Thanks to Paul Edwards for pointing this out.

Flaunt means to show off, and there may have been something of that in Patel’s behaviour, but we meant flouted, or brazenly disregarded. Flout is possibly from Dutch fluiten, to whistle, play the flute or hiss in derision.

Gotten back: We were inundated with two complaints about the use of “gotten” in a Home News in Brief item in the Daily Edition this week. We reported a survey that found “half of NHS bosses say that patient care has gotten worse over the past year”.

As I have written before, I like “gotten”, a past participle of “get” that died out in British English after we exported it to the New World, whence it is now being re-exported back. We used it five times last week, although one was a quotation (from Michelle Pfeiffer), one was an article syndicated from The New York Times and one was in the phrase “ill-gotten gains”, a fossil form that has survived the two-century exile.

No matter that I approve: we should be aware that for many of our readers “gotten” is a foreign word or, as Jenny Read put it, a “ghastly abuse of our language”. In news reports, we should cut it out. The above sentence could simply have read, “has worsened”.

Drowning in metaphor: We had a triple mixed metaphor this week in Andrew Grice’s analysis of the Patel affair, although it must be said it wasn’t his – he was quoting what “one senior Tory” told him: “She tried to run before she could walk and was exposed as out of her depth.” As Bruce Napier wrote, “apart from the confusion between propulsion on land and water, the last thing you are when out of your depth is exposed, being under water”.

Rather wonderful.