Mea Culpa: A fawning comparison for Audrey Hepburn

Questions of style and spelling in this week’s Independent

Audrey Hepburn, not a lustful Roman god: Hulton Archive/Getty (Getty)

A charming error in an article looking back at the career of Audrey Hepburn, 25 years after her death. We quoted Alec Guinness on her appearance in The Lavender Hill Mob in 1951: “She only had half a line to say and I don’t think she said it in any particular or interesting way, but her faun-like beauty and presence were remarkable.”

As John Schluter pointed out, a faun is a lustful rural god, a man with a goat’s horns, ears, legs, and tail. The word comes from the name of the Roman pastoral god Faunus. Mr Tumnus in the Narnia books is a faun.

Guinness was referring to a fawn, a young deer in its first year. The difference in spelling is arbitrary, but there it is.

(And neither has anything to do with fawn as a verb, meaning “make a display of servile devotion”, which comes from Old English fagnian “make or be glad”, related to fain, an archaic word meaning pleased or gladly – “the traveller was fain to sleep” or “I would fain get a little rest”.)

Quotidian: We used the dread phrase “on a daily basis” a couple of times recently. Last week we wrote about the anxiety of Thomas Markle, the Duchess of Sussex’s father, “at being ‘harassed’ on a daily basis by paparazzi”. This week we referred to “those of us who engross ourselves in football on a daily basis”. In both cases I think “every day” would be preferable.

Has it come to this? Talking of the difference between plodding language and the poetry of plain English, we had a few examples of “when it comes to” as well this week.

One was in a fascinating story about the frequency with which speakers of different languages say “thank you” (the Cha’palaa of Ecuador, for example, never thank one another). It began: “When it comes to manners, Britain is as famed as it is mocked for its unrelenting penchant for politeness.”

Better, I think, to go straight into it: “Britain is as famed…”

Another was in our guide to wedding makeup, in which we said “getting married also creates a lot of pressure, particularly when it comes to looking your very best”. No comment on the content, naturally, but the style could be improved by cutting out the dead phrase thus: “Getting married also creates a lot of pressure, particularly to look your very best.”