34 Saturday December 4 2021 | the timesComment
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1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GFhave a niece who lives in Winchester,
Hamps? I don’t think so.”
In my defence, I will say that there
are online sources which give both
Salop and Shrops, but I’m happy to
bow to popular opinion and say
sorry for wounded susceptibilities.
Anyway, thanks to Mr Applegate I
have an excuse to wheel out the
classic limerick:
There was a young curate of Salisbury
Whose manners were all halisbury-
scalisbury
He wandered round Hampshire
Without any pampshire
Till the bishop compelled him to
walisbury.
And while we’re on the subject of
Sarum, it seems that we can
sometimes be just too helpful. Tom
Morton of Otley, West Yorks, wrote:
“Thank you for the picture caption
informing us that Salisbury
Cathedral is ‘an Anglican cathedral
in Wiltshire’. Was this for the benefit
of Russian tourists?”Spreading joy
W
e’re often accused, by alert
readers who’ve spotted
horrible homophones,
literals or mis-spellings, that we are
over-reliant on autocorrect, or else
we do not use it enough. Either way,
it certainly can be a hazard.
To Ann Walker who wrote to let us
know that her newsagent had been
let down by his distributor last
Saturday and as a result had been
unable to deliver her margarine, I
can only say how very sorry I am
and wish her butter luck next week.isn’t the captain, and that any writer
tempted to switch between the two
for the sake of elegant variation
should promptly desist.Stirring defence
W
e recently reported that
The Oldie magazine had
awarded Delia Smith the
accolade of “Truly Scrumptious
Oldie of the Year”. This prompted
Huw Davies of Woking to point out
that we had wrongly promoted her
to a damehood — an easy
assumption to make and at least the
error was in her favour.
Now, apparently, we’ve blotted our
Delia cookbook again. George
Rutherford from Aberdeen is boiling
because we published a photograph
of the great lady resting her eyes
during the Norwich-Newcastle game
on Tuesday, with accompanying
caption suggesting that the thrill of
the occasion had not been quite
enough to keep her awake.
“Delia is aged 80,” he writes. “The
picture was taken after 9pm on a
wet winter’s night 250 miles from
home with her team trailing. Let’s
see if your caption writer doesn’t
nod off occasionally when he gets to
her age.”
Respect where it’s due.Shropshire shortcuts
B
oy, did I get a thick ear for
abbreviating Shropshire, in last
week’s column, to “Shrops”.
“Really?” wrote Charles Applegate,
in one of the politer emails.
“Shropshire or Salop, surely. Do Iconstruction than “Experts warn
that we’re all doomed”. I hope that
the grade inflation bothering Peter
Saunders doesn’t mean that we’ll
refuse to take the warning seriously
if it emanates only from experts of
the common or garden type, and
delay running for the hills unless it
comes from the “top”.Commanding respect
I
think it’s safe to say that Lt Cdr RN
(retd) Malcolm Fewtrell is an
expert, at least when it comes to
naval terminology. As he aptly
remarks, this is something that “has
never been easy to fathom”, so he has
written to explain, in some detail,
why he felt our obituary of Vice-
Admiral Rory McLean might have
led to some confusion.
“You describe him as being
commander of HMS Invincible.
However, ‘big ships’ have both a
commander and commanding
officer, and these are two very
different things. The commanding
officer is the officer in command of a
ship, or shore base, and in his career
Vice-Admiral McLean was lucky
enough to have commanded six
ships, including Invincible, while the
commander is the executive officer,
or second-in-command, which is
similar to the first lieutenant in a
smaller ship. Carriers also have a first
lieutenant but this is a seamanship
role and further explanation of that
might cause even greater confusion.”
Let’s not go there, then. I think the
short message is that the captain is
the commander but the commanderP
eter Saunders of Newport
says he’s had enough of
experts. Fair enough. There
are a lot of them about
nowadays and, as he points
out, they seem to have been going
through a sort of grade inflation.
“I shuddered,” he writes, “when
experts became ‘leading experts’. But
now the cover of Times2 has referred
to ‘top experts’. Surely there can be
only one top expert. Can we please
go back to the happy days when
‘expert’ sufficed?”
This doesn’t seem unreasonable.
The style guide advises us to use
“expert” sparingly, and a quick
search of the paper over the pastWe’ll try to stop
going over the
top about experts
week or so suggests that a reminder
on the subject might have been
overdue. In headlines and
introductions, where space is limited
and we want to grab attention,
“expert” is a useful shorthand, but it
is not enough to carry a story on its
own. We owe it to readers to explain
early on who these all-purpose
“experts” are and in what field
they’ve earned the description. In
some cases we could just be more
explicit in the first place. If we’re
talking about a lawyer, it’s unhelpful
— and unnecessary — to call them a
“legal expert”. If, on the other hand,
they are an expert on constitutional
law, we might as well say so.
As a headline word, “experts” falls
into a category the style guide
describes as dull and offputting but
essential — other examples being
ministers, civil servants, government,
etc. Such words, it suggests, are best
deployed at the end of the headline:
“We’re all doomed, experts warn” is a
more dramatic and immediateRos e
Wild
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