Mea Culpa: The germ of a pedantic idea

John Rentoul on questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

A certain writer got himself in a pickle about scientific matters (EPA)

Let me start by telling myself off. I wrote last week about why Prime Minister’s Questions was going ahead in what Adam Boulton of Sky News called “the pool of germs that is the House of Commons”, and commented: “A virus isn’t a germ but we know what he meant.”

Usually, pedantry is a higher calling and an admirable quality, but on this occasion I was just making a nuisance of myself. The Oxford dictionary defines a germ as “a microorganism, especially one which causes disease”. A virus is not an organism; it is not quite a living thing, although it is able to use living things to make copies of itself.

But this is a distinction without a difference, and Joe Morison rightly pointed out that the first usage example given by the Shorter Oxford is: “I picked up this wretched germ somehow – it’s a virus pneumonia.”

The difference between bacteria and viruses is important for knowing how to fight different forms of infection, but it wasn’t relevant here, where we were talking about an infectious disease.

People use germs to mean bacteria and viruses that cause disease and so I should have kept my smart aleckry to myself.

Executive summary: We praised a bar in Istanbul in a travel guide to the city: “The cocktails are plentiful and well executed, using fresh herbs…” Can you really “execute” a cocktail? Having looked up the etymology – from Latin exsequi, “follow up, punish”, from ex- “out” and sequi “follow” – I suppose it could just mean that the bar staff followed the instructions well.

Degrees of veneration: Thanks to a lapsed Anglican reader for letting us know that the “Ven Sarah Bullock, Bishop of Shrewsbury” was incorrectly titled last week. “The correct designation for a bishop, whether diocesan or suffragan, is always Rt Rev, that is, Right Reverend,” we were told. “The only exceptions for bishops are for those who are archbishops or metropolitans, who are designated Most Rev; or of course His Eminence if they are cardinals.”

This mistake presumably occurred because when bishop Bullock first appeared in our pages she was the Archdeacon of York, and archdeacons are known as the Ven. Just to complete the list, cathedral deans are the Very Rev.

This all seems pretty silly to me, as the son of a minister who disliked being called Reverend, because he didn’t see why his congregation should revere him. But if people are to have titles, we should get them right.

Helical motion: The economy was in a “downward spiral” in an editorial last week. Perhaps this was meant to make it sound better than just going straight down. Elsewhere, we referred to inflation as “spiralling prices”. It seems that everything in economics, whether it is going up or down, is also rotating.