Mea Culpa: the grammatical implications of rewriting the constitution

An ocean-going pedalo and other questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

What should we infer from Putin’s actions? (AFP/Getty)

Do we really need separate words for implying and inferring? I was taught that to imply something is to suggest it indirectly, whereas to infer something was to deduce it from indirect statements. The Oxford dictionary is stern about this, and says: “Imply and infer do not mean the same thing and should not be used interchangeably.”

This seems to be a losing battle against a natural change as language evolves. Increasingly “infer” is used to mean “imply”, and I suspect this is another of those cases where there is a long history of it being used thus. As ever, it shouldn’t matter, but as long as a significant number of our readers are sensitive to the difference, it helps to know it, and makes us sound cleverer if we observe the Oxford’s strictures.

This becomes trickier when we turn verbs into nouns and talk about implications and inferences. In a fascinating article last week about what Vladimir Putin is up to in rewriting the Russian constitution, we wrote: “Nobody knows what the president’s real intentions are but one logical inference of the detail of his constitutional reform is that he wants out.”