Mea Culpa: So many language rules are merely preferences, but we aim for consistency

We wrote of “language competency requirements” in a comment article about the home secretary’s decision to lift the immigration cap for NHS doctors and nurses. That would normally be “competence”. The extra syllable gave me pause, even though I wasn’t reading it out loud. But then I realised that we didn’t need the word at all. “Language requirements” would have said all we needed.

The fashion for “-cy” endings also gave us “an oasis of normalcy” this week. There is nothing wrong with “normalcy”, although the Oxford Dictionary calls it “North American”, and it is true the usual British English is “normality”.

In this case, the version I would use has the extra syllable, so that just goes to show that I was making up a reason for my preference. Perhaps I should call it my preferency.

Stink of destruction: An unusual confusion of words that sound alike affected an article about Yemen, in which we said that American, British and French expressions of humanitarian concern “wreak of hypocrisy”.

Thanks to Bernard Theobald for drawing attention to this, which has now been changed to “reek”. It was the metaphorical stench of hypocrisy that concerned us, rather than the destruction wreaked by it.

This is similar to a slip that is so common that dictionaries have accepted it. Our style is to write “racked” with doubt, guilt or pain, although “wracked” is often seen. In this case, racked is a reference to torture on the rack, but has been confused with wrack, an obsolete form of wreck. Either makes sense, but to “wreak” of hypocrisy does not.

Repeated denials: An article in defence of Sir Martin Sorrell, the departed boss of the advertising giant WPP, mentioned “the accusation he used company funds to pay a prostitute, which he denies, and the claimed bullying of staff, also refuted”.

As Paul Edwards pointed out, we don’t usually use “refuted” to mean “denied”. It is often used to mean that, but we need to remember that for many readers it has a more specific meaning of “disproved”. We used it here presumably to avoid repeating “denies”. But there is nothing wrong with repeating plain words, and the attempt to do so often leads to glitches of this kind.

In the middle of it: It is a little unfair to comment, from my comfortable armchair in the corner of the newsroom, about the overuse of “amid” by my hard-working and fast-typing colleagues. It is a useful word in news reporting, but we do sometimes end up with some curious constructions. We had a skirmish in Syria “amid a backdrop of escalating regional tensions”; we mentioned Britain sending 150 troops to Poland two years ago “amid increased Russian aggression”; and a man who “collapsed and died amid fears he had been poisoned”.

“Against”; “in response to”; and “prompting” would have been better in these respective cases. Easy for me to say afterwards, I know, but “amid” really is a word worth trying to avoid.