The Times - UK (2020-09-05)

32 1GM Saturday September 5 2020 | the times

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maligned groups, like the philistines

(actually highly cultured),

neanderthals (really quite house-

trained), vandals, visigoths,

barbarians and the rest. They were

all probably charming when you got

to know them, unlike the members

of the St Andrews drinking clubs.

Forgettable flowers

W

e published a photo of the

Duke and Duchess of Sussex

planting “forget-me-nots”

on the anniversary of the death of

Princess Diana. Michael Bourdeaux

wrote from Iffley, Oxon, “To me, the

flowers were the wrong colour and

too big. Forget-me-nots are tiny, blue

and not in flower in high summer.”

Quite right. Forget-me-nots

certainly suited the picture agency’s

narrative, which we seem to have

swallowed hook, line and sinker, but

those flowers were palpably petunias.

Keith Robinson from Littlewick

Green, Berks, was delighted, he said,

that angling was enjoying post-

lockdown popularity, although he

thought our picture caption, “A

fisherman casts off at dawn at Blyth

pier.. .”, was a bit fishy. “Casting off

is a knitting or a boating term; it is

definitely not an angling term, where

one casts but does not cast off.”

He did, however, enjoy “a touch of

comic genius from the picture editor

who, in the absence of photographic

evidence of Rita Ora actually fishing

like the other celebrities shown,

showed her posing in what looked

for all the world like a huge landing

net, plus fishnet tights”.

was very simple — rather than the

labour involved in assembling the

ingredients. I don’t imagine my

village shop stocks pul biber either,

though, so I sympathise. I did try

searching for it on Tesco’s website,

which responded with six pages of

nappies, which was a surprise.

As ever, Google is your friend if

you are baffled. Pul biber is also

known as Aleppo or halaby pepper,

and is all the go among today’s

cookerati. For those of us who live in

the culinary sticks a few chili flakes

mixed with paprika seems to be the

recommended substitute.

Medieval attitudes

I

n Thursday’s Times2 feature about

St Andrews University, we said

that “thanks to the number of

secretive drinking societies and

expensive balls, it wasn’t just the

architecture that felt medieval”.

This, according to Andrew

Ratomski, was unfair to the Middle

Ages. “I can only assume your

correspondent elected not to take

the optional Medievalism module in

English at St Andrews. If they had,

they would have learnt that it is

misguided to associate the medieval

period with contemporary notions of

excess, amoralism, violence and a

degenerate value system. Much of

our popular understanding of what is

described as medieval is the product

of literature from after the medieval

period (such as Walter Scott’s

Ivanhoe).”

That’s a relief. Now we can add our

medieval ancestors to those other

N

igel Saul writes that he is

“driven to complain about

the spreading use in your

paper — or, rather, the

spreading misuse — of

the horrid phrase ‘due to’. On

Monday you reported that ‘In June

no one under the age of 25 died due

to the coronavirus.’ This is wrong.

The sentence should have read ‘In

June no one under the age of 25 died

as a result of coronavirus’. ‘Due to’ is

constantly being used where the

wording ‘because of’ or ‘as a result

of’ is needed. An example of correct

usage of the phrase ‘due to’ would be

‘The terrible accident was due to a

Today’s style guide has relaxed its

strictures: “In an ideal world we

might use ‘due’ only as an adjective

and insist on attaching it always to a

noun. So we would write, eg ‘His

absence was due to illness’ and never

‘He was absent due to illness’. The

latter usage, beloved of railway

announcers, treats ‘due to’ as a

compound preposition equivalent to

‘because of’ or ‘owing to’. It may

offend purists, but it is both widely

used and easily understood; there is

no reason to take elaborate measures

to avoid it.”

A fuss about something

L

ast Saturday we ran an extract

from a book of what were billed

as “no-fuss” recipes. You could

have fooled me, says Richard Frost.

“As an untrained cook I much

enjoy the Magazine recipes, which

are different and interesting,

although some are beyond me.” The

latter included our “no-fuss” recipes

which, he contends, require quite a

lot of fussing. “No doubt ordinary

salt can be substituted for ‘Maldon

sea salt flakes’ and ordinary dried

oregano for the ‘wild’ version, but the

precision — ‘Greek’ basil rather than

the basil I grow on my windowsill —

is rather daunting. Also, some of the

ingredients cannot be obtained

within reasonable driving distance of

where I live in Surrey, pul biber, for

example, which appears in two of the

seven recipes.”

In fairness to the cookbook, I

believe the lack of fuss was a

reference to the method — which

We’re not unduly

worried by the

‘due to’ vigilantes

fault in the machinery.’ ”

Mr Saul would have got on with

my mother, also a “due to” vigilante,

who drummed that rule in to me so

soundly that to this day I nervously

substitute “owing to” whenever

tempted to use it. I’m afraid, though,

that like the Oxford comma this rule

has gone with the wind.

Until 2003, successive editions of

the Times style guide followed

Fowler’s 1926 edict in Modern English

Usage that “due to” used as a

preposition, although “as common as

can be”, was illiterate. “Due is an

adjective and there must be a noun

somewhere to which it refers. It must

not be used as the equivalent of

‘because of’ or ‘owing to’.”

In fact “due to” has been used in

such a way since the late-19th

century, and The Cambridge Guide to

English Usage (2004), says that there

is “no reason to perpetuate the

shibboleth against due to, when the

grammatical grounds for objecting to

it are so dubious”.

Ros e

Wild

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