Mea Culpa: Putting a price on the departure of Mr and Ms Mugabe

Old French, Latin and rules for consistency in this week’s Independent

John Rentoul
Friday 24 November 2017 12:51 GMT
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Robert and Grace Mugabe at a rally to declare support for her to become the next vice-president two days after they ousted  Emmerson Mnangagwa
Robert and Grace Mugabe at a rally to declare support for her to become the next vice-president two days after they ousted Emmerson Mnangagwa

We wrote this week about African leaders “being kept appraised of plans” to end the confrontation between Robert Mugabe and his opponents in Zimbabwe. We changed it to “apprised” after Ian Watson wrote to point out the confusion.

To appraise means to assess or size up, whereas to apprise means to keep someone informed. The distinction is quite arbitrary, as the pronunciation and spellings might just as well be the other way round. Appraise originally meant “set a price on”: it is an alteration of apprize, from Old French aprisier, from pris, price. Apprise is from French appris, apprise, past participle of apprendre, learn, teach, from Latin apprehendere, which also gave us apprehend.

But the convention is well enough established, and we ought to stick to it, because it helps to keep our writing consistent and authoritative.

Master piece: Mr Watson was also put out by our reference to Mr Mugabe’s wife Grace as Ms Mugabe. Which just goes to show that you cannot please all the readers all the time. Our style is Mr for men and Ms for women at second mention, unless they have another title. We do not think it right to distinguish people by whether or not they are married, so we don’t do it for men or women.

In the past this has prompted complaints about our calling the Prime Minister Ms May. When I checked on this a year ago, we were inconsistent about it, but our sub-editors have cracked down and our writers have trained themselves: last week all 21 references were in the form “Ms May” – except for one: we used “Mrs May” when we were quoting someone.

Ghost hyphens: We often say that someone is “20-years-old”, or whatever age they are. These are ghost hyphens, surviving from the familiar adjectival phrase, the “20-year-old maths genius”. Compound adjectives such as these, before the noun, are usually held together with hyphens because otherwise ambiguities can arise, such as “we need more qualified workers”. (We don’t use hyphens after words ending –ly, because the ending does the job of tying it to the next word, such as “the highly qualified workers”.)

If the age is not given in the form of a compound adjective, we should say the maths genius is 20 years old, without hyphens.

Back-formed singular: David Haye pulled out of a boxing match after he suffered “a partially torn bicep after falling down some stairs during training”, we wrote this week. My problem with this is the word “after”: we can safely assume that the muscle was torn while falling down stairs.

However, one of our frequent correspondents wrote to point out this old favourite: the muscle is called biceps, singular. It’s Latin, so some of us have made our own singular in English. Guy Keleny, my predecessor, once wrote that the Latin plural of biceps is actually bicipetes, but no one is going to start using that. So strictly, it should be “a partially torn biceps”, but I don’t think it matters.

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